#002 - The Story Of A Independent Artist Quitting The Music Industry After 13 Years | The Kev Decor Story

Kev Decor 002

Met kevin a few years back. Very interesting individual with a long and complex story.  with alot of gems. 13 years of passion and life lessons really something that can't be understated this is the kev decor episode.


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The story of a independent artist quitting the music industry after 13 years | The Kev decor Story 002

Transcript

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what's up what's up you're tuned in to another episode of hustle man show i got a i got a special guest with me today i've known this guy for uh quite a while we've had a this is one of i've had a lot of people that i've met over the years i'm gonna say this is one of the most interesting people that i've met he uh he goes by the name of kev decor okay he's an artist a content creator he now lives in california and um i was speaking them the other day we were talking about just different content strategies and stuff and um it just bumped into my mind i said i gotta have him on the show gotta have an episode on his journey what it is that he's done and um i wanna introduce him kevin you wanna tell them a little bit about yourself thank you man i appreciate that uh yeah so my name is kev decor from new jersey atlantic county to be specific southern new jersey um i've known muhammad for a couple years now very very solid individual yeah i'm a musician an artist multi-disciplinary artist i would say um music being my main medium video uh i also write articles every now and then and um yeah i'm an artist so it's a pleasure to be here man thank you appreciate that thank you for being on here so some people say that they're an artist i'm gonna be honest i've met a lot of people over the years and they they talk about their art and i struck you know i struggle to believe in the fact that they're an artist from the first time that i met this cat and let's keep it real we've always we've not always seen eye to eye on this on on things but yeah from the first moment that i've met this guy you know really shortly after that i really i really became to understand that this guy is really he really is an artist true and true um and that creative eye really shines in a lot of the projects that you handle um so you're i want you to to tell people a little bit more about what you know what brought you into the music industry when that decision was to go into it right what i mean when you're a creative you're a creative let's let's keep it clear that's that starts at a younger age but at what point do you go from like kevin otterano to kev the core and when do you commit to the idea of becoming an artist like at what age does that happen sure sure um and it's not your bed but it's a door no just you know just adorable my bad um yeah it's all right it's all good um so you know 15 15 years old uh my family moved from vetner city which is right outside of atlantic city to egg harbor township and around that time um you know i didn't have anybody in my neighborhood because the the neighborhood that i moved into was a development and if you know anything about the south jersey area like if you lived there around that time it was like a boom i would say of a bunch of neighborhoods with like new developments new neighborhoods and stuff like that so i went from being like in living an inner city kind of life to uh kind of living in the sticks you know in the woods and um i was just you know bored out in my mind at a new high school don't know anybody no way of getting you know it's my friends so it was around that time and i had dabbled into music a little bit beforehand but um not in the way that i did eventually my freshman year of high school in this new town when you know by chance i i found uh a beat making software that also allowed allows you to record and pretty much out of boredom i just started i started creating and you know i had been taking like banned um drumming in particular from 5th grade to 8th grade so i kind of had that music bug in me but i didn't really express it in the way that i was when i eventually started writing and putting like lyrics to like beats and stuff like that and making beats and all that so 15 years old was when i decided like this is what i want to do in my life um and then it didn't take it took another four or five years before i realized that okay i'm like really really about to do this like with my life you know i'm gonna dedicate and commit my life to this no matter where it takes me um which was when i graduated high school so you're 15 years old and you know that this is what you want to do i just knew um and i don't know i don't know like what it was you know about my own personality but i just kind of always knew that that was just going to be it you know because you think about a 15 year old you don't know [ __ ] yeah like you don't you don't know anything so but i just kind of had this feeling that i didn't contest in my own mind that was like yo like this is it like this is what i'm gonna do so you're committed at 15. you know for a fact this is what you're going to do so let's let me ask you this question you you you said you got into band you got into music did that all come naturally to you you just picked up you just understood music the funny thing is that uh you know like most people have musicians in their family and they come from they come from that kind of artistic you know familial background but for me i didn't really have any family that was like into music i didn't grow up around instruments i didn't i didn't have anybody that kind of showed me the ropes i just i remember in fourth grade was the first time that we had the option to choose an elective in middle school um so it was like everybody decided whether they wanted to do like you had to take band basically it was abandoned something else but for band you had to choose an instrument and for whatever reason i just gravitated toward the drums and i and i decided like yeah i want to be in band you know right um so from there it did come naturally because um i excelled really fast and amongst my uh classmates in band there was only like three or four drummers which i'm still friends with those people to this day but i got pretty damn good like really fast and then i kind of became the main um like jazz band drummer like playing the drum set and you know and that yeah just kind of it kind of came to me naturally but music music like as far as like writing and recording and all that um in eighth grade me and my friends made like a tape um dissing all the margate kids because we had this big beef you know bettner and margate and um i don't know how but that record vocals i never talked about this before so like i don't know how but somehow i figured out that using uh windows movie maker right you could record audio through the computer microphone and lay it over two tracks so i would record my my vocals and then have like a beat that i would download off of like kazaa i don't know if you remember because i yeah and like where's and all those uh programs so that's when i discovered what an instrumental was and i found those instrumentals so me and my boys we made a bunch of like diss tracks over some g-unit beats and[ __ ] and that was like it was fun but it wasn't like the feeling i had you know when i was a freshman um and i was like yo like this is it felt more like an outlet at that time when i when i jumped into it freshman year it was like purely it was just pure it was like i really it felt therapeutic to me that's dope so this is something you just put your heart into it it's really you know yeah i really did man and i still have um i still have um boxes like shoe boxes all the sheets all the notebooks you know stacks and notebooks i used to write every day like every single day that's still in school yeah everything finding yourself at a young age like that man that doesn't that doesn't normally i didn't know who i was at 15. you know yeah you know what something that i realized is that um i was really blessed man you know because to know that that young that early like what you gravitate to is rare right like you said and um i really i realized that you know because all of my friends in high school they didn't know like what they wanted to do in college they had no idea like what their their like it thing was and for me i didn't know where it was gonna take me but and i had big ambitions of course but i just knew yo regardless if this [ __ ] ever works or not this is the only thing i could see myself doing so so you're 15 years old you go into high school you've committed yourself mentally uh yeah most people are not committing themselves to anything mentally at that age they they're they're absorbing what their friends their family whoever around them is saying that they should be doing with their life and they're making a shallow decision based on that right that's what i normally see because you know i deal with a lot of different different age groups in terms of hiring and stuff they don't really know what they want to do but they've maybe sometimes committed to something which they're not really sure of but you you're wholeheartedly into this you know you're gonna do this you move on so you go from 15 15 right take me through going from high school to trying to follow through on this thing that you've wholeheartedly committed on so what's next after high school so i don't know if you've ever experienced this in your own life but uh and i don't know if you're familiar with carl young he's a psychologist one of the the leading uh figures in psychology considered one of the fathers of psychology he talks about the circumambulation which is basically a cycle or a pattern that occurs in everybody's life that is like the repeated hurdle that people it's like that thing that you have to overcome in your life that keeps showing up you know in one form or another and it's unique to every specific person so for me i didn't realize this at the time of course but in hindsight you know looking back now i realize that what it would occur to me with my musical uh passion uh later would reveal itself to be the circumambulation of my own life which is that i didn't fit in with everybody else and so i kind of had to you know like i really wanted to when i got to egg harbor township it was a very like creative arts kind of community and like in the school if you weren't a dancer you were a singer or you were a rapper or like you were part of some crew some click like it was very like artistic right so um when i got there of course new kid in a new town um no friends uh no neighbors you know what i'm saying so i wanted to fit in and like figure out like what crew i could kind of like get in with or what friends i could make and and i loved how everybody was into something so i really try to like connect with people on a musical level but of course a i was ass at that time um and b i just for whatever reason man i just i couldn't like fit in with anybody so i really throughout my high school years i really learned how to kind of keep my head down and focus on myself and just kind of be in my own little world and then later on i realized that that was gonna be the pattern throughout my entire musical journey up until now as we speak still focusing on and um focusing on you not trying to be a part of what's going on um if you don't fit in and um that's where my my biggest triumphs came from so where do you where do you go from high school what's nice so from high school so from high school freshman year i was asked you know i was terrible i thought i was great though and then like freshman year to sophomore year i got a little bit better sophomore year to junior year i got a little bit better and then junior year to senior year was when like people that i that i kept showing my music to started to be like yo like okay like this is kind of you starting to like get something going you know so um so then it's so funny because it seems it's gonna seem so miniscule to like everybody else but at the time it was a big [ __ ] deal there was this guy who was who was um part of this like pretty well-known local uh rap group who basically you know thought he was being funny like you know kind of challenged me to like a battle so he went home recorded this track i went home recorded this track of course i was the unknown kind of underdog or whatever i would just always be in the back of the cast the back of the class writing nobody really knew like what i was up to but i dropped my diss track on myspace myspace music he dropped his and like the whole[ __ ] like all my people went crazy and um i kind of became known uh kind of like as a battle rapper because i also did a bunch of cafeteria uh rap battles and i really like surprised a lot of people you know that kind of didn't know like what i was up to so so i kind of like started to feel like very confident about like my abilities because i went from like being relatively um not liked and unknown amongst my peers to like kind of being respected in that small community and then and that all results it for me like stop you know like eventually deciding to stop trying to fit in and get along with the people that i wanted to do things with and instead focused on my craft and just wrote like every day you know what i mean so that was kind of like high school in a nutshell once high school was over everybody's rushing off to college and and um everybody's like unsure but you know obviously the usual pressure that people feel from parents and stuff like that everybody decides to go to college but me i decided to hang back and really think about what i wanted to do because i knew for a fact anything academic was not going to be my path right if it didn't have anything to do with music or creativity in any kind of way it wasn't going to be for me so i didn't go to college when everybody went to college instead i kept working on music so a couple i would say like nine ten months into that year after high school after graduating uh my boy hits me up he's like yo um i don't know if you know but they have schools for like audio engineering and music specifically for that right um and i was like really i don't i don't know why but i was so late to the idea that i could actually go to school for music and like do something with it you know what i mean so when he sent me this i literally googled it um i found the school it was called the institute of audio research it was in new york city in manhattan um and right away instantly i was like this is it right here yo um and then and then my boy my best friend he told me about this other school called full sail which was basically like the same thing but it was like way more like bougie it was like way more like you know they had a campus they had it was crazy but uh iar short for institute of audio research in new york city was like more like small more um more like gritty but actually they were one of the first audio schools in the world so um and their tuition was way cheaper so um hold on one second what what's tuition for a school like that a year um so institute of audio research was 16k a year yeah and full sale was like 67. crazy and and increasing every year crazy and how many years are you going to the school aar i ir was uh iar one year yeah one year uh full sale you could go i think for one year they had a one-year program but um you could go for two years and get a bachelor's also right at the time i was like you know it just because of the money it didn't make sense to me um so so is this school real quick is this school an accredited school is it are you walking away with some kind of degree and audio so iar you don't walk away with a degree but you walk away with a legitimate uh engineering and music production certification certificate so basically you can go work at any major record studio record record label or recording studio that's owned by a record label you know the biggest studios in the world you can go and show up and if you have that they they consider that you know something that's legitimate sure um and academic but the whole um the whole idea of it is that it's kind of like a trade school so if you want to be a chef you know i'm sure you can go to a vocational school and stuff and stuff like that and get get that going but so yeah and then i like i like that aspect of it too that it was like wow i can go for a year get all the training i need and either go work somewhere you know close to this or just use that knowledge for myself you know for my own craft and so the whole purpose of it for me though was i'm going to go here to learn how to do what i need to do for my own music not because i want to work for somebody else as an engineer you know what i mean so um so you know long story short we go my mom this is this was like a big moment so i've had two two major moments in my life and in my career that i felt like we're like like ain't no way in the [ __ ] world this can happen unless it was meant to happen you know what i mean so so we went to see the school look for apartments and stuff like that went with my best friends they were going to come with me too and um basically um there was no way my mom was going to get approved for like the the um the loan to get to pay the tuition so we're sitting there with like the school i forget what they call them the uh the people that are in charge of like onboarding you um so we're sitting there with him and he's like he's like okay so we're gonna do a credit check and because it wasn't like a big school there was no fafsa there was no like aid you know what i mean so it was like you got to get a credit line or nothing right so um my mom told me she was like oh man like i don't think i'm gonna get approved for this she didn't know that there was no like government aid or anything like that so and i didn't either so we're sitting there with the guy and he's like she's like i could tell she's like heartbroken because she really wanted to do this for me but the guy was like you know what we should just try because you never know so he runs her credit she somehow someway gets approved and i was like damn like it was just like an all or nothing moment and the reason why i consider it to be such a life-changing moment was because um had had she not gotten approved i wouldn't have gone and that moment was so monumental to my development that i don't know like what i would have been on a completely different path maybe i would have been in the same place maybe further i don't know but it was just so big for me at the time looking back so she so she got approved and um tuition was 16k so now i'm getting ready to go to the school so um so i go i moved to new york well first of all rewind i had no apartment had no place to live um and like school starts on a monday and it's a friday right so i i end up deciding like yeah i'm gonna have to drive to new york and back every day i don't know for how long but until i find a place to stay at well so hold on hold on let me let me just stop you right there so you go to new york you don't have a place to stay but you you just barely get the the economics right your mom gets approved for this loan you barely get in but then you decide you're going to commute back and forth for for reference that way people understand what kind of commute would that have been for you back and forth every day so that's two and a half hours one way so it's a five hour commute yeah five hour commute and yeah and the reason why you wanted to do this is you didn't have any money to get an apartment you're like uh 18 19 at the time yeah i didn't have any i didn't have any money to uh to get an apartment and um you know i was trying to find something affordable but at that time and i'm sure right now too the market was crazy for apartment so like unless you were getting something like in [ __ ] harlem right now like in a [ __ ] project building right like you weren't gonna find anything like decent right so i decided like i gotta do this [ __ ] you know i gotta do what i gotta do so without knowing how long this was gonna last i started driving up and driving back and that [ __ ] was crazy i would get up how long so i did it for i think a week and a half and then suddenly out of nowhere a co-worker of my mom's at the casino tells her that his sister's um his sister his wife's sister has a spare room in her apartment that she's renting out in the bronx south bronx so of course you know it was a little expensive but it did the job right so got the room this is my first time even though it was only two and a half hours away you gotta understand at this time i think i'm like i think i'm 19 or 20 and i've never been you know away from home like that and we're talking about the bronx right so like this was not [ __ ] you know it was not a walk in the park type of place right so i get there move in um and yeah i'm on my own basically like this old this this very old lady and i'm so grateful for her to this day i should call her see how she's doing um maria she it was just her and like the other room wasn't rented so it was just me and her but basically she lived her own life you know she was barely there and i'm just like this is it i'm out here right so so basically man that was tough for me man that was tough and i really learned you know the difference between real friends and acquaintances at that time period you know that was one of those life lessons too because my phone was so [ __ ] dry bro like i remember like the first or the second night like i got emotional man because i just felt like yo like i'm out here by my [ __ ] self like it was just crazy and um and yeah man and then every day i would commute to school like 40 minutes 45 minutes so i would take the ford train from south bronx uh 176th street to be specific down to manhattan and um i would take it back and then as soon as i got home from school i would work on music like apply all the [ __ ] that i learned and i did that for a couple months and um yeah and then eventually eventually i had this experience that uh created a fork in the road for me and you know at the end of my at the end of my program so first of all the program was great i met a lot of people made a lot of connect connections a lot of people that i still kind of uh stay in touch with every now and then to this day um i'm so grateful for that time period because it really taught me a lot about myself it taught me a lot about my craft um it gave me the tools to continue to build on my on my tools and my craft uh for the next seven years um based off of that knowledge and i was like the guy that sat in the front of the class like i wasn't trying to talk to nobody like i was there to [ __ ] i was on a mission um but i learned so much and um and yeah i'm just so grateful for that time period it really taught me a lot uh it was hard but it was great i was it was what i needed and um at the end of that program uh my apartment had a bed bug situation which was embarrassing and bro like i was like it was crazy to me it was it was just so crazy and like the building that i lived in was like a hood ass building like it was it was a project building you know um and uh i don't know shout out to the bronx for real man it was like it was crazy man but that [ __ ] like that [ __ ] took me up a little bit because i didn't have any money to like get anything exterminated like it was just like it was rough and at that moment i decided like you know what i'm either going to stay here and work at a studio which is what i don't want to do ultimately where i'm going to go home and build something and so i made that hard decision and and i went home i finished my program i graduated it was like you know one of the top in my class um and yeah then i came home and i got right to work um with saving up some money and um building a studio in my mom's basement so so and who financed is that so i was working at starbucks in new york city right um i was a shift supervisor there i transferred to a starbucks in atlantic city so as soon as i got home i was working in starbucks i literally saved up every[ __ ] paycheck for like i'ma say months but it was like three months um and then i also my mom knew somebody who knew somebody that was uh kind of like a they would lend money you know what i mean so now my mom let me take that back uh somebody knew somebody that you know they they lent money and stuff like that and it was you know friend of the family type of thing so i i ended up borrowing a couple thousand dollars combine that with my paychecks and that together went all the way in and built this studio and when i say like you know and you know i also had my my best friends which also ended up being my my musical partners we started a label together called local music group um shout out michael luna and lunatic you know we together you know we chipped in you know here and there you know we painted this [ __ ] like we really like built this [ __ ] you know so we hired a contractor for dirt cheap they built the framework and everything that i designed um and i applied the knowledge that i that i learned from my uh studio building class at school in new york city um to like build this thing to like you know um you know industry standard it was it was in my mom's basement but this [ __ ] was like industry standard you know as industry standard as you can get it with the amount of money that we put into it which was you know a good amount of money how much how much money does it cost to build a studio that you would consider a good studio to work out of back then between 15 and 20 you know if you're like on a shoestring type of budget yeah um back then but now under 10k easy because the equipment is different it's a whole different game yeah yeah it's a whole different game now yeah i mean i'm on i'm i'm rocking like under 10k right now in my apartment and it's i'm getting you know standard yeah so that also has to do a little bit about you know what you're able to do too but yeah so built this studio this is 2011 just to paint the picture right so i went to audio school in 2010 i graduated in 2009 uh from high school and then i graduated from the audio program at the end of 2010 so 2011 i get home and from 2011 to the end of 2011 we bang out the studio between saving up getting the money building it design everything and then 2012 was when like we really kicked things off so 2012 i started operating the studio basically as like a business so you know i started recording all the local artists and i started like i just went ham on trying to like capitalize on the studio and create a community actually you know a community with all the artists in the area because at that time nobody was really offering um any any industry quality uh studio services and and equipment um the biggest name in south jersey at the time and probably still was rodney jerkins and so if you if you've never seen the inside of ronny jerking studio which i haven't i mean you got to build your own [ __ ] so that was my whole approach where was his studio it was in northfield egg harbor township like harvard township yeah so real real quick your mom she takes out that loan right i think we just kind of kind of hovered over that parents that are are supportive right that was everything i mean that doesn't that doesn't automatically happen right yeah not all not all parents are supportive and not always parents are supportive of that kind of craft because that's a very specific craft and there's a lot of risk involved so some parents you know the music industry is a tough industry based on you know my limited knowledge you know i kind of hover over it there's a lot there's a lot there it's not an industry it's not an easy industry to get involved in so not many parents are going to be quick to say you know what i support your decision i'm going to help finance it so yeah talk a little bit about that in terms of how supportive your mom was yeah so my beginnings with all of this from day one um i remember my mom got me my first computer when i was like uh i must have been like i don't know like 15 or something like that oh no maybe like uh maybe like 13. my mom got me my first computer and at that time was when computers were starting to get a little bit more affordable so you had like the 256 megabyte you know hp or gateway type of thing you know i mean that you can get from like sam's club so and and so my mom is is from dominican republic she's very old school um a lot of dominicans are very old school that's just part of the culture and so buying a computer was a big big no right but her friend convinced her and i remember she had somebody like uh my cousin's friend who was like into computers come by and like install parental control and all this stuff it was just funny but um so that was the computer that kind of like initially i found a way through windows movie maker to kind of start recording[ __ ] but fast forward uh freshman year when i got that beat program you know i basically took my mom's debit card without her knowing and ordered the software it was like 20 bucks it was a cd-rom for a computer program and i saw it as a myspace ad um which is crazy just to think about like damn [ __ ] marketing but anyway uh we're advertising so yeah i got this i got this program called hip hop ej4 it was the fourth version i got it you know without my mom really knowing because at that time it was like[ __ ] sacrilege to order anything off the internet with a [ __ ] credit card or a debit card right so you know if you have immigrant parents like the internet was such a weird like yeah unknown thing it was very suspect it's it's super sexy it's it was very suspect for a long time and we take it for granted right now you know your amazon your amazon everything you're buying stuff online regularly but that wasn't always the case bro like a few years back that was not the case and also that's not the case overseas right those that infrastructure that infrastructure that exists right now for fulfillment of orders oh hell no man it's crazy to me like amazon could never be built in an environment where that infrastructure doesn't exist they're leveraging all of that infrastructure when you get an opportunity there's a video on youtube of of bezos of jeff bezos talking about the the he he makes an analogy with the the the way that that the electric grid system developed and allowed and yeah and allowed for like appliances and television and radio he makes that analogy with amazon wow right so nice very deep so so for example like there would never be an amazon if there was no usps if there was no roads right yeah if there was no no no ups no fedex no no like infrastructure they actually stood on the shoulders of years and years of development right we have like social and political you know some some sort at this point you would say of there's there's there's stability and safety in this country yeah 90 percent of packages in other countries are getting robbed let's keep it 100. you know like here that's not the case you know when you get a package from amazon you're going to get your pack i mean they do get it happens that's what i was going to say yeah but not on the bro no they would never be able to build a billion dollar multi-billion dollar did you hear the stat on bazels he just want he just uh throughout the pandemic i think his net worth went up a few billion dollars like not not like one bill like a few billion i don't have the exact numbers i don't want to misquote it but his net worth goes up a few billion dollars during the pandemic you're talking about infrastructure this is a first world infrastructure if your family is from the dominican republic if your family's from morocco if your family is from mexico if your family is from all these third world i guess they would call it third world nations or second world nations you don't have the luxury of that infrastructure they're absolutely not right yeah and also one one other thing i just want to i want to tell you the luxury of studying music that is a luxury of the first world yeah right yeah so absolutely so so think about what hierarchy of needs have to be filled in order for you to say something as audacious as i want to study music and art yeah even even a hundred years ago you couldn't you couldn't pursue writing even as an author as a profession that was not something that was even an option so absolutely yeah very very fortunate yeah that's unfortunate so you go so you and i only got the software because it was so like cheap right yeah and i don't think that if it popped up on my mom's radar like her bank account or whatever i don't know what the [ __ ] i was thinking but i was just like i'ma just order this right so i did and you know eventually she found out about it and it was cool everything was fine but um that software was quintessential to everything else because um that was like the building blocks so this was a twenty dollar software twenty dollar cd-rom what did that software top ej4 yeah what was that software why why was that software so important like what was it um anybody could look this up on on google or probably even youtube i've looked it up before i found the cover and everything and there's like screenshots of it so basically it was a it was a software that allowed you it had a loop library within the software um of like different drum loops different melody loops different like sound effects and you could just drag these loops into a grid and like legos but with audio make something wow you know what i mean and then they had the ability to where if you had a microphone on your computer or you got a microphone from radio shack because they didn't have in you know internal microphones back then um so i got an eight dollar microphone from radio shack um plugged it in and i was able to record vocals through basically uh like a webcam mic for a while into that program and export it as one song yeah so at that time you know we had the ipods you know um i had this like busted ass ipod that i got for super cheap but um yeah i would just i would export it make my songs export it show it to my people at school you know people would kind of be like ah you know and then over time it got it got better and better but so that was like the early stages real real quick you kind of hovered over this point but i'm still i'm still trying to digest oh yeah yes oh no no no that you leave new york to come down to south jersey right yeah so new york at the time bro you talking about early 2000 like 2010 2011 that's when that's when right yeah what was the music scene like over there at that time man rich it was definitely rich so so then so then the next question to that is if it's a rich music scene why do you decide to come back to south jersey because south jersey because it's not really the mecca of music at that point right you would think that if if if you want if i want to be an artist right like i would go to california like you ended up doing or i would go to new york because that's where music is popping so why what what makes you say like you know what this is this is the richest music scene on the east coast it's probably there in like florida at the time right this pop in florida yeah miami yeah atlanta i don't think was in the conference i didn't even know atlanta was a place until later like 2015 and stuff like that but why did you decide to leave if it was such a rich area for music because the traditionally at that time that period in time in music the frame of thought um when it came to like the path that one would take wasn't in alignment with what i knew i wanted to do so the path was go to audio school and within the school they had programs that helped you land internships at the major all the major recording studios that was the only thing that they promised you that they would like go hard on trying to get done for you once you place you in an internship yeah did you do that i don't know no so that was the that was the fork i was like and it was just common practice and knowledge at the time that when you go to intern at a studio you're grabbing coffee sweeping floors cleaning bathrooms for like four years minimum right minimum before you even get to be an assistant and then once you're an assistant you've got to put five years in minimum and then on the off chance that that guy that's the head engineer gets sick and like you're the only person that can record you know [ __ ] nelly or ja rule or something and like he loves you for some reason yeah that's the only that was like the only way and that was just like such a concrete way of thinking at that time that i was like that's definitely not what i want to do at all and i don't know why but i've always been very aware like hyper aware of time um so in high school i'll go to shoprite and i'll be like yo why are like 50 and 60 year olds working at shoprite you know what i mean like i don't want to party now work hard later i want to work hard now and relax later so i've always i don't know why i've always thought about it like that so i was like i don't want to put five years into something that i don't want to do and then decide that it's not for me right so i'd rather take this risk right now but have it be a trajectory that that is in favor of what i want to do with my life you know so i saw new jersey as an as a a gap that could be filled and i felt like i could feel that gap you thought there was nobody you thought there was nobody in jersey providing music service a place where people creators can come in order to create their content their music specifically yeah you were not on video and and photography or anything like that you were just specifically on music and you thought that you would knock out two birds once so i'm gonna build this studio i'm gonna leverage the studio for myself and i'm gonna fill the gaps with other artists so you won't turn into exactly exactly and um and basically in new york my recording situation was like none i still have a picture of me with like a like my studio set up in new york i post it every now and then as a reminder like 2010 i had a bed mattress the one that i would sleep on i would i would post it up against the wall with the [ __ ] covers and everything on it still hang all my clothes in my closet up on the the frame that's under the mattress on the side just to create kind of like a vocal booth you know what i mean so but it was i mean when you live in an apartment building in the bronx bro like it doesn't the noise does not stop all night long all day long so there was it was that i had this like hurdle trying to record good quality audio that was not being met either so if i stayed in new york worked my ass off and interned to work towards something that i didn't want to ultimately do and didn't have a place to record i was like man i'm super like i'm losing big time but if i go to jersey all my basic needs are met because i would be able to utilize the space at my mom's house um so i wouldn't have to worry about rent i could build a business and i could have a place to do my craft you know in peace and i feel like you know sometimes i have a moment where i reflect and i'm like damn what would life be like if i stayed in new york right and i go back and i say there's only been two times when i've had these like super big moments in my life that i think about so new york was one of them and it was that moment of me deciding to come back to jersey because it had i stayed in new york my life would no doubt be different so if you if you turn back the clock would you have stayed in new york i think about that all the time but nah i would i would have made the same decision because i feel like it was the right decision to make because of where it's gotten me in relation to what my goal has always been my dream i gotcha you know so um you you had a different trajectory if you would have stayed in new york you would became an engineer you would have been an intern and the grind would have been a very very long grind for you to do something that you didn't want to do anyways yeah and for some reason i was just tapped into my into my inner guide in that way that i just knew like that just wasn't gonna be a happy path for me um even if it was close to music it wouldn't be in the music the way i wanted wanted to be in it so so you come back to jersey you build the studio you borrow my studio you scrape it together money y'all painting walls building stuff on your own buying equipment that is hard to afford because you're young you know you don't have a rich uncle that's just handing you cash and saying go go do what you want so so take me through the next few years before you decide i'm going where i'm going where the action is you know you know uh before i jump into that um two things like at that time i felt like the universe was like really like yo like this is you right now because it just so happened that some of the gear that i needed like the way that things came about man was so crazy like this guy was was liquidating his studio in north jersey at the time when i was looking for a microphone and a preamp and the microphone was was four grand retail price and the preamp was like 225 uh like 2200 and so i definitely did not have like 6k to put up you know for that but this guy sold me the mic and the preamp for like 2300 off of craigslist brand new bro i still got that microphone still got that microphone it's my baby like i i still use it it's on every recording that you that is online period um what it what is what is that what does that look recently what does that call in the alchemist what does it say oh yeah uh the universe conspires uh the universe conspires when you trade universe you strive when you dream when you want something bad enough the universe conspires to bring it to you and i really learned something because at that time you know when i was working at starbucks i was saving up every check it was like 500 checks just piling them on top of the piling piling piling but it still wouldn't have been enough to get everything done but somehow someway like everything just kind of like i was so focused on this [ __ ] bro like everything just kind of morphed into being the right situation to accomplish that and so that was a huge lesson for me and this is way before i read the alchemist but it was a huge lesson for me that like when i focus on things and i'm [ __ ] determined i get them done um so i wanted to point that out is that like you know people when people go in and they bet all their chips man i really feel like if it's in their heart like it'll it'll happen um and so uh my mom for whatever reason has always been super supportive and she originally was always that parent that was like oh you're gonna be a lawyer you're gonna be a doctor you know because that's the american dream especially for immigrant families when they come to the states it's like yo you got to get the top most secure the best you know lifestyle so whatever career aligns with that that's what you got to go for you know college and everything but for whatever reason when i started to drift towards music and the creative arts my mom was like fully on board she was like you know of course i would love for you to be a doctor or a lawyer but if this is what you want to do um i support you that's crazy was she's always been i don't know why but she's always been super supportive you know one of my biggest one of my biggest fans even though she don't even understand the english music that i'd be making but um she's always been like my biggest fan to this day like i talked to her earlier today and she's just like she knows i'm working hard as [ __ ] right now she's like yo like you know stay focused like don't worry everything's gonna work out you know and um that's that's 100 a blessing to have a parent it is man it is i know i'm lucky i know i'm lucky enough so when sometimes a lot of parents of uh let's just say of like foreign descent right like immigrant parents right they project their their life goals on their kids and and they and then what i see is what they'll do is they'll project those life goals on their kids and if if they have the audacity to dream right or they have to have their own dreams or their own life ambitions they aspire to do something different there's like a bitterness about it they're like they're upset at you because they had to make decisions to put you in a position where you could succeed and then you didn't take that and then you don't [ __ ] they think that you're you're choosing to fail where you're you're thinking i'm doing what it is that i believe is going to be the best option for me and i have a hard time adjusting their process their thought process for that some you're like you're one of the lucky ones some parents they kind of hold on to that grudge like indefinitely that can become a hurdle that can definitely become a hurdle it becomes a moot point for them forever they just they won't they won't they won't let go of that that mental block that how that you chose to do something other than what it is that i thought you should have done and yeah and that's you know that you know it's a tough becomes a tough relationship because it limits that it limits that relationship for sure and i i see it in uh and colleagues all the time my contemporaries i see how they struggle with the the family aspect which i'm like man that's not even a factor for me you know you know like yeah you know and for a while it was because i'm like damn like you know i was really i guess once i became aware that like my music wasn't for everybody i was like damn i hope you know i'm not like upsetting anyone but at the same time i was like nah like i know i got the people that matter their support and at the end of the day this is my life you know and i gotta i just gotta do me you know so for sure yeah so what was the other point that you had said you were like so um damn we were like uh so you build a studio you know you built you guys you built you build a studio and you decide to come back to south jersey you decide that new york brooklyn uh the bronx excuse me the bronx is not where you want to be you borrow this money right to build this thing what's the next few steps like what is it that you're doing next you're deciding to make this a business how are you monetizing it how are you making this a profitable thing where your mom's not like i just blew 16 grand on your education and you're out here just doing nothing like what's the next step there yeah so um i basically started just going ham like promoting like these little demo packages for like artists in the area so i'll be like yo we'll do a five song ep for like five six hundred bucks or you know we'll do eight songs for eight hundred so what are you doing are you master like what are you doing explain that recording recording editing mixing mastering sending it out um them coming over to listen back to the mixes oh they want their vocals up on this one they want this down on this one like everything top to bottom um and as a result of that i began to spend way too much time way too much time working on other people's stuff and i felt that my my own craft wasn't getting the attention that it deserved um for myself so i was doing like 12 hour sessions like people come in at 12 don't leave to one you know 2 a.m you know just to get a 100 payment you know and we got three more tracks to go you know what i mean so like at a certain wow i would say like a year and a half into that it began to become clear to me that i wasn't doing it the most efficient way um and so what i did was i started to scale back on how many people i would let come to the studio to record even on a on a single session basis so i would start to limit myself and be like yo i'm only doing one session like in a day and i'm only doing three sessions this week because i got to spend some time working on my projects so there came a point i would say this is like two and a half years into that so let's just go from 2012 to like 2014 2014 i decided yo i'm shutting the studio down from from clients not taking no more clients and that was a big decision at the time because i had so many people that relied on my services in the area because it was the most high quality services that you can get for that price point in the area um and yeah i was actually kind of nervous about telling everybody like that's how big of a deal it was so i was like nervous to tell everybody yo the studio is no longer you know accepting you know sessions so i did that though and that's when everything began to flourish for me i worked on a couple mixtapes from 2014 to 2015 i worked on like two projects and i had some before that in 2013 and 2012 but they didn't get that much attention like from me so 2014 2015 i really buckled down and worked on my own projects and that resulted in love being broke which became a classic amongst my my core fans um and i did that with myself vince luna lunatic and michael luna we worked on that for months and um and my manager at the time sean sean baptist um which i connected with him i connected with him by doing by opening up for a rap group that was like really doing their thing in philly but basically um he jumped on board as my manager at that time and we worked on this project and this project came out like really good i thought it was going to change my life it didn't end up changing my life in that kind of way but it was a big project and it was like my proudest work up until from 2011 everything was preparation for that project in 2015 when i released it um and to me i still think it's a masterpiece to this day um so yeah so 2015 i would say was my official uh ascent ascension to like okay i'm a full-blown artist like like i'm about to break into the game type of thing so hold on you meet you meet this guy at a show you're opening up for a different act you meet this guy at a show he's managing a different act he goes wait hold on a second i think this guy got some talent let me see if i can connect with him he ends up being yeah he ends up being a manager sort of so basically uh 20 2014 i'm like really trying to expand because i'm like in my full artist's bag right so um at the time i was trying to figure out man how can i get shows you know how could i like expand to like philly and new york like to do shows and [ __ ] because i had been i had done a bunch of open mics and stuff in new york and that kind of got me my that like new york city is like the trenches when it comes to live performance like you got to get your stripes in new york city so i did that when i was in new york um but so i'm home now and i'm like okay i gotta get back into the swing of live performance and stuff so my my younger brother kenny he i mean he must have been like 14 at the time he sends like a cold email to the manager of a group that he was a huge fan of um that group was called ocd motion twist um i don't believe they're they're together anymore um recently i think they broke up but i could be wrong but anyway they were like popping in philly they were like they made it type of thing right so he sends a cold email to their their manager i don't even know like this is my younger brother i'm like i don't even know if he even knows how to use email but he sends an email he their manager responds after listening to a couple tracks and he's like yo this is fire i'd love to connect come out open up for uh for motion twist at the tla in philly which is a legendary uh yeah i'm familiar so so i was like [ __ ] like i lost my [ __ ] i thought it was like i was like yo it's game over like we about to go on tour you know all this stuff so so anyway we go we do the show tear it up um i remember they came out during my set like who the [ __ ] is this right like it was fire and i had a bunch of people come out from jersey it was dope so we killed that right their manager at the time um and i don't want to put too much of his business out there but he basically was thinking about leaving the situation of managing them and he thought i had a lot of potential he wasn't the guy that became that i mentioned he was like another guy so we linked up and he's like yo a couple weeks later after sending him music he's like yo i think i want to start managing you um he's like you know i got a lot of connects in the industry and i feel like we could do a lot of a lot of damage so i'm like yo let's [ __ ] go right so this at this point this became the biggest moment in my career up to date right so um let's just be let me let me stop you right there before love being broke really quick let me stop you right there when when when you're an artist like that and somebody says i want to manage you how contractual was that obligation handshake it's all handshakes at that at that point at that point so there's no contractual obligation it's not like you guys are signing a record a deal together this is just this is somebody that's a that sees talent in you and says listen i think i can take you a little bit further than where you at yeah um the reason why it was such a big deal was because even though it was just on a handshake he had brought he had been with those artists from bedroom days i guess you could say to likes you know semi stardom where they were like doing their own tours independently and they were like living off of their music type of [ __ ] so i took it as like yo [ __ ] well if you did that then you have the the tools and abilities to help me take what i'm doing to the next level right so this is before love being broke though right so this is like 20 early 2014 late 2013. so um so he starts we start working on the ep so he's like all right the first thing we got to do is get a body of work together so that i could present it to the proper people um so for like six months bro i work on this ten track ep like my best work at the end of this six months he starts giving me the run around regarding uh launching the project and he's like yo i got some things happening long story short he ends up telling me that he's he's dealing with too much stuff emotionally and in his life where he can't give the project and my career its full attention um his full attention so he was like but what i am gonna do i'm gonna have to step away from this unfortunately but what i am gonna do is i'm gonna put you in contact with my guy who's also a manager and he works closely with the guys right now so that ended up being the guy sean baptist uh and he's from um he's from uh but with uh not buffalo uh what's the other place in new york what um new york's a big place you talking about the city are you talking about outside the city no it's outside the city it's not it's not one of the boroughs new rochelle no it's the other one oh albany albany so he's from albany right so so he um so i so he connected me with him and we had a conversation and he was just like yo i'ma help you out so it was another handshake type of thing right and i was like yo i was like very hesitant because i was kind of like[ __ ] i was [ __ ] up over that last situation i was like man i just put all this work into it and then he listens to the project he's like yo this is good but you got potential to do better let's scrap that and work on a whole new project wow so that project never even came out um which still like [ __ ] bugs me to this day because there was some good ass music for that time period of where i was but um so we started working on what then became known as love being broke so that was a long process like i would say like eight nine months but it was my best work to date at that time came out in 2015. i finished it at the end of 2014 came out in 2015 because of the whole uh rollout plan that we had and everything um and basically he had some he had like i'm gonna say he had what you would call like barbershop connections you know i'm saying like like he knew people but it wasn't like he was calling up any labels or anything like that you know i mean like he just knew a couple people in the business and stuff like that but it wasn't it wasn't anything life-changing um solid dude you know i'm still friends with him we've had we've had our moments um but solid dude um and we we ended up making something great you know i was proud of that so where do where do you go from there you make you make this you make this album it gets distributed it gets yeah how does he distribute the album so what we did was we formed some very service level connections with uh some of the blogs that were at the time you know big blogs so like uh djbooth.net was a big one um good music all day was a big one um and maybe a couple others but when the project launched all the all the people that were supposed to launch it like completely flake and it was a bad launch because of that so um you know we so we released three videos or two videos and um leading up to the album launch then we launched it the the blogs that were that said they were going to launch it didn't launch it [ __ ] up our game plan a little bit but eventually like a week or two later they picked it up and you know they showed love so it was all good but basically we had we had our differences about how everything came came out at the end um and that's when i kind of decided like you know what i'm gonna just go my own way you go your way and um you know there's no beef but you know time to expand you know so that was a big moment that was a big chapter because it was the end of a chapter um once we kind of split so where you go from there you release this you release this record you don't feel like it's getting the he's not doing his job as a promoter or a distributor or whatever the case may be whatever it is it didn't get distributed correctly so where where do you go from there how do you go from there how do you muster up the courage to keep going at that point i'm not gonna lie man i was [ __ ] i don't even think heartbroken is the word you know i just i really felt like the quality of the music in that project was like so so contemporary it was different but it was at the quality and at the level of the biggest names of music and i still believe that to this day at that time period um so i thought that that project was gonna change my life and everybody around me it didn't and it took me a couple months to kind of get myself together to like muster up the the confidence and the courage to be like man [ __ ] all that like i'm gonna just continue to just pump these records out so what i did though that was different was that i saw how much time i put into that project and what the results were it did get attention it did get some attention but i was expecting that project to get like chance the rapper uh acid rap level attention right it did not right and the difference was that while my project appeared on one two blogs that chance the rapper acid rap when that came out it was everywhere so what was it literally everywhere right what is the difference between that that album's distribution and i guess you answered that question with this guy having barbershop connections he was not an industry insider to distribute it that way but yeah elaborate on the differences between somebody because because chance was was independent right during that time right now even even to this day even up until last year there's still a lot of speculation around what his trajectory actually was because um at that time i just wasn't conceptually experienced conceptually experienced enough in the industry to really understand how the the machine works you know what i mean so so and and by the way because i'm sure one day he'll see this like i'm not i'm not throwing any shade at anybody i'm just you know given my experience so um he knows us all love but basically we tried to like hit people love and be like yo we gotta we got some dope music you know this person you know that person like just check this out you know let us know if you would like to support it and a couple people did right but chance the rapper he he had whether it was whether you want to call it pr or or resources in high places i don't know what the [ __ ] but he was on everything two dope boys djbooth.net good music all day uh fake short drive you know like everything uh hot new hip hop whatever it was at that time he was on there why why do you what happened why do you think all these blogs all these distributions supported his record like that or i mean why would what is the difference between it's manufactured it's manufacturing it's not it's not like they all on the same day heard it and we're like yo this has to go it wasn't that that's what i would consider to be uh organic truly independent it's like somebody heard your [ __ ] and they're like yo this is [ __ ] fire you know what i'm saying or like you really did the legwork of hitting everybody up meeting everybody making those connections and building those relationships and everybody just happened to [ __ ] with you but what that was was a baby version of what labels do today still do today you know what i mean it was like everybody got the got the directive from whoever and was like yo on this day this goes out here's the money here's the the relationship that you're continuing to to coddle and um this is what we're this is the program for this day you know what i'm saying this airs after the super bowl on you know whatever whatever yeah well that's how that's how it works so that's the difference and i don't know if it's if it was money relationships or whatever but to this day people argue that because chance um you know has has the family background of being in the president's you know uh house and all this stuff like his dad worked for like uh president obama he was part of the campaign and stuff like that i don't know i don't really want to get into it because i don't want to try to make it sound like i know what the [ __ ] actually happened but i do know from what i've learned over the years that that doesn't just happen unless there's a machine behind it it's distribution bro distribution is a business and so in every respect distribution is a business yeah so that was the difference because when i play anyway i don't want to get into comparing but you know i know my [ __ ] was fire right so like you can't you can't convince me otherwise so so you're you're you're going through this process things are not working right do you ever like do you ever stop to think to yourself you know maybe i need to educate myself in a different area maybe i need like you start to think to yourself what other options do i have are you educating yourself generally in other areas like or are you so committed to your craft that it's like i got blind design i got my i got tunnel vision bro and this is all i want to do nah i'm i'm a multi i'm a i'm a person of many hats and many skills and um anybody that knows me can tell can tell you that i'm not somebody who just accepts things as they are and like well[ __ ] it i'm gonna just do this because this is all i know how to do no i'm the kind of person that used to take apart remote control cars because i just needed to know how the motor worked and i figured out how it worked you know um i'm the kind of person that needs to reverse engineer things and understand how they work so that i can then apply my own methods to it so i quickly became somebody who did their own [ __ ] outreach did their own you know maintain their own relationships with the blogs even after my manager you know stopped and um shot my own videos learned how to talk myself how to do video because i didn't have a videographer everything remember the circumambulation that i mentioned by carl jung because i didn't fit in and because i didn't have the resources to do a lot of things within my journey ultimately um i had to learn how to do those things and get those resources from myself as opposed to other people so you know my favorite one of my favorite quotes of all time is necessity is the mother of invention you know that is the theme that is the theme of my journey because i couldn't get in with these people that knew these people and could do this and provide that i had to figure out how to do that [ __ ] myself and because i didn't have the funds and the capital to do this i got to build it on my own i got to figure out how to make it from zero you know so so i realized distribution and funding was a was a thing so i tried to learn everything i could about marketing about pr i hired people i remember i was paying these people from north jersey 1200 a month for like three four months because they promised the p word in marketing right they promised uh to deliver on getting myself out there nothing nothing yeah so you're you're you're learning all these things and you're teaching yourself how to learn along the process you're figuring out how to learn actually i want to i want to make sure that i highlight this because what you just said is super important one of the biggest things that i learned at the end of my program from one of my teachers in audio school was that he was like he was like kind of giving us like parting words and he was like hey just remember that you didn't come here to learn how to be an audio engineer you came here to learn how to learn once you leave here and i walked away with that frame of mind that like because the the thing the philosophy at audio school is that you're not gonna learn everything that you that you need you know you're not gonna walk out of there mixing like like the people that mix rihanna you're gonna walk out of there with the essentials and the toolkit to understand and dissect and reconstruct and build and develop those skills over time with that foundational knowledge so everything that i did moving forward was deconstructing learning and applying you know so where where are you headed at this point where's your trajectories and what what what year is it what year is it so it's 20 late 2015 early 2016 i i read a book that was recommended in the youtube uh creator section the help section for creators in youtube um they were giving tips on how to be a successful youtuber like how to get your channel out there and they referenced the book called primal branding um primal branding excuse me by uh it was things like greg something but if you look for you'll find it it has like a like a like a tribal tiki mask on the cover but anyway so they mentioned this book and it fascinated me because the concepts that they were talking about made me understand marketing on a different level and how youtubers became youtubers so what they would do is they would focus on frequency and consistency so youtubers got into that whole oh new video new vlog every tuesday every thursday um and that that was like at the i would say the um the pinnacle of when that started to boom where like vloggers started to do like a scheduled video right so you would know for jenna marbles i didn't watch jenna mars but you would know like she does her videos every tuesday or some [ __ ] like that so i was like wow so i read the book and then i was like okay frequency and consistency helps build um expectation and consumers and it creates a pattern and habit where they need that fix kind of like ninja turtles every morning you know sunday morning every morning yeah exactly so so that theory uh kind of lit up a light bulb in my head so 2016 i start releasing a record every week 2016. i did that from 2016 all the way to almost the end of 2017. how are you distributing that record you're releasing a record how's it getting out soundcloud um and then and then i added to at the time i was using um cd baby intune core so with those it would go up onto spotify well i don't think spotify was around at the time maybe it was um but itunes and everywhere else so this is a syndication platform it pushes your content yeah to multiple platforms yeah yeah it was the only way you could upload music and have it on itunes you had to go through a distributor like that unless you were on a major label so cd baby and tunecore eventually i stopped using tunecore because you gotta pay ten dollars every time you upload to tunecore and then you gotta pay that on a yearly basis so if you drop 100 songs you got to pay a thousand dollars a year plus whatever you continue to drop where cd baby was just you pay once and then they take a percentage for the lifetime of it which eventually i realized was not good math but anyway so um so yeah so i'm releasing on soundcloud youtube all the music uh platforms distribution platforms like itunes and i'm just literally like almost like[ __ ] panhandling my music like yo anybody anytime i get the chance i'm like yo you know check out my music i would go to barber shops in pleasantonville and[ __ ] rap for the barbers and tom you know uh then i just dropped a new project like i did all that [ __ ] all the gorilla [ __ ] you could think of i did i waited for jay-z outside of the 40-40 club when he came into town and it was in the paper i went i [ __ ] waited outside for three hours me and my boy vince lunatic in the [ __ ] rain cold as [ __ ] waited saw him walk in and in that[ __ ] five second window you know called his name out he looked back i told him i got a cd for him he walked inside nothing happened you know i did like all the crazy [ __ ] you could think of because i was always that kind of person that was like yo this person is going to be at this place nah i'm waiting outside i don't care if it's for eight hours i'm a [ __ ] i'm i'ma tell them what i do and i'm showing what i do and i always kind of thought that that that would be the moment that everything changed and everything came together i just i don't know why i always thought that that was like that was just a narrative that i had in my head um of how it was gonna happen and to be honest with you that narrative stayed with me up until like last year when i when i finally woke up and uh and i realized like ain't nobody gonna gonna change your life for you you gotta change it for yourself facts so so this is 2018 now yeah yeah you're close so 2017 i'm still releasing a song every week right mad records out and then and then i have a conversation with a friend who was traveling the world as as like a a group trip thing that he was doing so he comes back from like prague you know and i met him through a friend he comes back from like prague or some crazy place and he's in town and it just so happens that he his hobby was music he built the studio in his house and everything was legit but he was just kind of more of a hobbyist but he was like he came by the studio one day when he came into town he was like yo like i feel like you've done everything you could possibly do as a local artist in this area i feel like you've hit your glass ceiling um like you've done everything and we haven't even talked about it but me and my boys my partners uh mike and vince we put together an independent regional tour like [ __ ] completely bootstrapped it got sponsors on our own everything did shows like in jersey pennsylvania like it was it was crazy it was dope it was small but it was successful in that aspect that we pulled it off anyway so my boy is like yo you did everything you toured you [ __ ] you talk to everybody you can you've been doing this [ __ ] for years you shot the videos you did all that [ __ ] but you're still here like you haven't broken into like the industry and when i hear your music i hear it the same way i hear j cole drake whoever so like the only thing that i could think of is that maybe you're not in the right place that conversation that night i call my girlfriend i'm like yo we're moving to l.a and 2017 two months later we moved to l.a we drive across the country um with my best friends and we get we get to la and we uh we stay with my brother and his best friend all four of us shared two-bedroom apartment in west hollywood for the next two years and and now this is my third year in l.a that's crazy so so you're you're you're you're in l.a bro you fought you you follow your heart man you know i'll give you that you know it's not easy to do man there's there's there's there's a lot of along the way of trying to build something man there's a lot of there's a lot of reasons to doubt a lot of people kick you you know yeah man and some people do it like you know like a smooth kick they don't kick you with the yeah they don't kick you with like a like a karate kick kick to the head they just kind of kick some dust on you along the way you know and that that's that's a hard situation because you see that you're not having the success that you want i can only imagine going through a situation like that you're giving all this time all this effort you committed yourself and then you say you know what i'm going to drop everything i'm going to pick myself up and then i'm going to go like literally to the other side of the country yeah and start there it was crazy so so i sold everything you sold everything yeah i sold everything um because i had left my job my regular nine to five i was working security front desk security at this uh condominium in vetner and i was so [ __ ] over that place and i just i felt like it was like sucking my soul out of my body being there wasting my time when i knew i had so many other abilities and things that i could be doing my time and so eventually i mustered up the the courage to like put my put in my two weeks so i did and i told everybody like yo i'm gonna leave here to tour around the country and [ __ ] blow up and you know we put together the little tour once i left but i started to struggle with money and that [ __ ] was hard and that's around the time that you and i kind of like started to connect on a on a business level um and a creative level and um i was under a lot of different pressures but basically my love being broke project is basically around is based around the the concept that um that i kind of knew my family was in a lot of financial trouble um and my biggest fear was losing the studio that was my biggest fear so when i made that project i was so like in like in such terror that i would lose like the one place that i felt like was like hope you know for my life like the studio you know um and eventually after i left my job did the tour was struggling with money right before the la thing happened my mom was telling me that like i think you should go because i don't know what's going to happen with the house and so that [ __ ] was crazy like i just kind of felt like it's like i i kind of felt like it was a kick but it was like a you're already off the ledge type of kick like so you know even if you don't want to go like you got to you got to go there's not going to be anything for you to stay for yeah and um yeah man and uh we we did end up losing the house and the studio um but everything everything happens for a reason man and um i think that it it was like it happened at the right exact time that it needed to because had i been in jersey and that happened i don't know what i would be doing you know like or what i how would have managed to continue um because i wouldn't have a place to create so um so yeah you know my girlfriend was super ready to like try something new and she had her clothing line and and uh you know she was working on that it was going well and like we just kind of were like ready you know so like we did we came out here you know saved up a couple grand with selling everything and drove across the country got here and that was the end of the new jersey music chapter which was a long one um and the beginning of the new chapter which would then become the la chapter which we're kind of i would say in the middle of right now sure so you're in you're you're in l.a i would consider la one of the top markets in music right la and new york top markets in music along along along with the south parts of the south right yeah yeah for sure so so you're in you're in la and what do you find in l.a do you find that that you're looking for that moment you're still in a mindset where you're searching for a moment you're searching for that chance that opportunity that moment right so take me through that and what's the next series of events so i get to la and um i i was reading i'm always i'm always like you know kind of around the uh kind of around the whole topic of like okay so things aren't working what do you do so i'm always my mind is always working on like figuring stuff out you know like i have a very like problem-solving uh approach the way that i think so i'm always reading i'm always digesting videos on how something works like you know[ __ ] website design or like whatever like i'm always learning and one of the books that i was reading was around the the concept of compound interest and compounding and um it's like that uh that riddle that people ask they're like would you take a penny that doubles every day for 30 days or would you take a million dollars most people choose a million dollars but they don't understand how compounding works that penny that doubles every day in the course of 30 days is over seven million dollars you know so it's it's the eighth wonder of the world they call it yeah they call it they call interest they ate one over the world right for yeah for a reason a lot of people a lot of people don't understand the the idea or the the concept for good for good or for bad right right yeah they don't understand the concept it can go both ways so they don't unders they don't understand that in in many different form formulas so you're you read this book and you're you're in l.a you're in the you're one of the top markets what what is your trajectory at this point so i'm in la i don't know what the [ __ ] i'm about to do with all my music gear how am i set it up me and my girlfriend literally live in a bedroom like yeah we share an apartment with my brother and his best friend and that was a blessing in its own um but you know like now i'm like okay where am i gonna record you know what i'm saying so like i've somehow finessed it set all my [ __ ] up against the wall whatever uh and i start recording very uncomfortable going from a place a crea a creative place and you you know this because you have your own creative space having the ability to step into a physical place where you know it's met and dedicate bro that is a blessing like a blessing so i had that for many years so i went from that to and i was lucky to have it for the time that i did you know i went from that to like being in an apartment people upstairs people next to me like it's uncomfortable i'm trying to get into my creative space i'm like i got people all around me i feel crowded you got to learn how to create in a different different environment exactly very uncomfortable but between that book and a vlog that gary v had with nipsey hustle rest in peace where he talks about how he thinks the future is going to have an artist that releases a song every day because of the way that content is moving and the internet is progressing like it's uh you there's no way to flood the market because the market is constantly in a state of flood of flooding by like everything even if you're not dropping [ __ ] a hundred billion you are so it's like so the only way to break through is to be consistent and drop the most [ __ ] so i take that plus the the concept of compounding and then i also heard something from my guy ralph smart infinite waters who's a big youtube channel on youtube um based around like spirituality and[ __ ] like that and he talks about how his channel can you hear me so yeah yeah yeah i hear you he talks about how his channel went from like 30 000 subscribers to over a hundred because of compounding i'm like oh [ __ ] like the universe is talking to me so i'm like i'm gonna go from dropping a song every week to dropping a song every day crazy and i made that decision and i was like i can do it at first i was like nah this is crazy ain't no way but then i'm like wait i make the beat in a couple hours i write the lyrics in like an hour or two i record it in like two three hours i mix it and i master i can be done with in a work shift you know what i mean so it turns out it's not that simple but i started to do it and i pulled it off and i would say that every now and then i would run into a situation where i would i would lapse you know overnight like uh pulling all nighter into the next day and that you know that happened every every now and then which kind of threw my my timing off but it didn't change the fact that every single day that i woke up and opened my eyes a new song was made and that resulted in 281 songs crazy crazy went from that went from the the end of 2017 to middle of 2018. where are these songs somebody wants to hear them somebody wants to where they're on they're on they're on everything soundcloud uh spotify so somebody does a search for you kev decor kev decor yeah on soundcloud they can find them so you're how are you like how do you live your life making songs every day like how do you afford to live bro man i look back on these days which weren't that long ago and um i kind of cringed man because like the fact that i put myself through that not only that but i put my girlfriend through that [ __ ] i don't even know how she's still with me after that [ __ ] right so bro that that's i mean that that's that's that's the epitome of ryder right there somebody sticks through you through that whole process so so how are you like how did you live like how did you right so so um for the first couple of months i had money from selling everything so that was like my rep money then um so i didn't get a job right away then um i had a couple of valuable things that i brought with me tools that when things got to that point i was like yo i gotta sell this excuse me excuse me so i ended up selling my camera my gimbal a bunch of other [ __ ] um that i had to pay rent and um and then there was a couple months when my brother had to cover me you know what i'm saying like but he believed everybody everybody like believed so much in what we were doing that it was like if i gotta throw my last pair of sneakers into the [ __ ] to like you know to get the [ __ ] to pop like that's what i'ma do you know what i'm saying so like literally that was a mentality that was the group thing that we had we were so focused on that my brother became my manager um my girlfriend was kind of managing me during the interim before he became my manager um and together between us three it was like we were just throwing everything we had into like making sure that i was in this [ __ ] seat that i'm sitting in right now in front of this computer making a beat writing recording mixing mastering and uploading to the soundcloud and distro kid before i went to bed bro that's what i did that that's that dedication is insane i don't know a lot of i don't know i don't know a lot of people that would do that bro honestly i don't know a lot of people that would put themselves the people and honestly i'm gonna keep it real with you i don't know a lot of family members that bel that would believe so heavily in somebody else's dream that that they would support them and not on that level that's crazy you you have um you have interesting family bro for real for real yeah man i'm blessed man i am blessed man i really am um i i definitely put my health and high risk um but i didn't see a dentist for the first time in like three years like until a couple months ago like i mean like that's the level of like commitment which some people might look at that and be like bro like what are you doing but this this was all i saw this was complete tunnel vision and i looked back at that version of me and i'm like i don't even know how i was able to get into that mind state because now if i try to get back into that flow like i would have too many logical reasons why i shouldn't you know what i mean i guess i learned some lessons but you know um if you try if you try to get back into a flow where you're hyper focused on that one thing there's so much pain surrounding that it's there's pain but there's also so many lessons of like that's not that's not it that's not it that was a long lesson yeah it's just not the way you know so this this happens the first year that you're in california yeah so what's here so what what what was there any yield was there any fruit from that labor so what happened was my brother was working at a um at a lounge that was a rooftop lounge that was one of the most poppin lounges in west hollywood it makes it sound more glamorous than it is but you know it was a bar it was a popular bar a lot of industry people ended up just stumbling into this bar on their regular routine bar hopping route and so he because my brother so my brother um kenny he has a knack for understanding like who is who in movie and music he just understands that he knows he if he sees a face in a name once he'll remember that [ __ ] so he would recognize people coming in he'd be like yo i managed his artist uh kev decor every now and then they would be like oh you know he's your brother and then it would kind of catch people's interests right and then he would be like oh yeah he's been dropping a song every day for four months and then people be like wait what you know what i'm saying and then they'll be like okay here's my email like i gotta i gotta hear what the[ __ ] you know you know i gotta see this [ __ ] it's just different frequency and it was it was it was at at least it caught people's attention at the very least exactly so a couple months of that resulted eventually and so this one guy my brother was a doorman this one guy came up and uh he was trying to get in like he was trying to like basically not wait in line there was a long-ass line so he was like um yo um i'm with some big people right now you know we'll pay you like if we could just get in so he's so my brother's like like bro you're gonna have to pay like big money to get in right now so he's like all right um let me go talk to these people so he goes to talk to these people the a r guy um and then he comes back and then my brother was like what what industry do you work in and he's like music you know and i might have some of the details mixed up but basically essentially he ends up telling him like um my brother tells him give me your email i'ma send you some stuff and i'll let you guys in so he did so he sends them the email and then that same night the a r hits a bag he's like yo these are fire like let's set up a studio session so it turns out the anr works for a boutique label um that has a jv which in the music industry is a joint venture with a major label so um so we set up these sessions for me to come in and write for the the boutique label and you know long story short i end up writing there for like three months and or like two and a half months and during that time they decide that they want to work out a deal um because i guess they like what they're without what they're hearing from me and they got a couple other people so they're thinking of forming like an ovo type of situation right right so like a small label that partners with the major label like a universal republic or you know whatever so so this deal gets offered but it all stemmed from that one night because the guy heard that i was like doing this crazy ass [ __ ] and i was like seven months in at this point right for some crazy number so so so the utility of you putting out that frequency didn't have the intended effect but what it did get was somebody else's intention it got somebody else's attention that's exactly what happened and don't get me wrong the numbers were going up and stuff like that on on spotify and all this stuff and my brother was pitching the music to playlists and you know this was around the playlist boom time when playlists became crucial and lucrative in the music business so you know we were sending music out we were running ads on [ __ ] instagram facebook we were doing everything you could [ __ ] do um but what ended up really putting things in a different level was that chance encounter and that that slightly different thing that made somebody be like wait you're doing what you know so that's how that materialized and eventually i ended up entertaining the idea of this deal got a lawyer um and we negotiated hard for like two months on the terms of this deal um and the day i was supposed to sign i had a gut feeling i woke up i couldn't sleep i woke up i had a gut feeling i was like yeah i'm not doing it so that night i sent the email and i was like well me and my brother my manager at the time sent the email and it was like yo like i'm backing out and the next morning i thought these people were gonna be [ __ ] pissed because we spent so much [ __ ] time negotiating um but the owner the ceo and the president of the label called me and we're like yo like we gotta do this like we believe in you like and i'm like you know they were like the only thing we built rihanna we built you know these people the only thing we know is top one percent like we we can do that with you this boutique label had those kind of names that they built yeah really yeah um yeah one of the people was mark jordan he was rihanna's manager and responsible for rihanna uh becoming who she is um anybody could look that up both to to know that and to back out of that deal what's going in what's going through you you gave up everything you don't have anywhere to go like like take me through your mindset on what what like the like what's the thought process of saying that no i'm not doing this deal how bad was that deal for you to say i can't do this bro like what is the deal man i i don't know what it what it's been throughout my life i just kind of been really in tune with my gut man you know like when i get this feeling it brought me back to new york and making that split decision that would have altered the course of my journey and my life forever but going my gut and feeling like it was right you know and then going my gut for la and being like damn look at how far i've gotten look at who i'm talking to look at the conversations look at the phone calls look at the records like i was right you know what i mean so like and that was a gut feeling so when i woke up and i'm like yo something about this [ __ ] [ __ ] just doesn't feel right it was a gut feeling you know and it was that same there's a there's a texture there's a feeling like a color to that feeling you know what i mean and i feel like only i can discern what that feeling is in my body it's like my body has a certain reaction and so when i felt that i was like nah i can't and then real quick a business partner of mine when i first got you know when i first got to business on my own i had a partner i was like like 17 18 at the time and he was 31 so i was like young inexperienced i had the ability to sell i was good with people but i wasn't really like matured and like i didn't understand certain things i didn't understand how how numbers worked how how the money worked a lot of that stuff right so yeah one day you know we get into a situation where we're working with this guy and we're borrowing a lot of phones in order to sell these phones to customers and we end up owning them a lot of money in phones to do that and i go man i just don't have like i don't i feel like that this is not the right way to go right and he turns around and goes to me then then we shouldn't be doing this and i'm like but what's the re like why do i feel like he's like man there's there's there's a there's a school of thought that that uh goes by the thinking is this your your mind is processing so fast that all you're getting is an emotion and that's what that gut feeling is that you haven't deciphered the thought you haven't unpacked that thought into what it is and all you're getting is that gut in motion yeah and it takes you a while to say why do i feel like that but that emotion sometimes is right so for us and that scenario was definitely right so you you turn down the biggest deal of your life yeah yeah so take take me through that so um i kind of you know i i let them talk and he was like he was like man just like trust me on this you know um and i i felt like man i tried everything man i tried like and you know anybody can say they tried everything and in the back of their mind they know like they didn't try that one thing you know i mean like that one [ __ ] thing that like well did you wait outside the billboard for five hours you know like but you know i really tried everything that i felt was in within my reach to try and i [ __ ] worked hard and went to the extremes and i felt like nothing worked so i was like maybe i'm that guy who's so [ __ ] stubborn that doesn't see that he's in his own way maybe i need to expand you know shake hands and meet people and maybe i need to listen to people that have [ __ ] actually done this [ __ ] on a massive level and and let go of the steering wheel for a little bit and so that ended up being a decision that i took and i was like you know what all right man in that same conversation i was like all right let's do it so so you ended up so you ended up signing with that that boutique label went to staples signed it signed a contract sent it out and that was it um why didn't you want to do it what was the reason i felt that i felt that the terms didn't reflect their their energy what what about the terms during the time what specifically the terms like the there was a distribution period um and the distribution period was you know in favor of both parties but it was like hey we have certain amount of time to decide whether or not we want to give you the big paycheck you know and let's just see how things go let's release a couple singles you know what i mean let's and um and there was no there was no advance that was that was that made sense to like the work that i had put in i'm like bro i could barely figure out i could barely pay for what i'm gonna eat tonight i don't even think i can you're telling me you believe in me but like i don't know how i'm paying for gas to get to the studio tomorrow you know what i'm saying so like if you believe in me why aren't you like yo here's five grand like at least [ __ ] you know pay your rent you know like yeah i just you know and then and then it was like you know little [ __ ] like uh you know oh give us give us 18 months you know to kind of figure things out i'm like bro for 18 months you know how long i've been doing this for like i'm ready to go now you know like yeah if you tell me six months i'm that's gonna be tough but i'll i'll take that you know what i mean but like 18 months so i had to negotiate that down to 12 months i tried to get it to nine months but they fought me on that and i thought 12 was a reasonable middle ground um between me and my my attorney and my manager um and my counsel but you know like little things like that where i was like yeah but you know you're telling me you love me but you're not really showing up to the table in that way you know so i kind of felt like they were half stepping when it came to the paperwork so but it also afforded me the the opportunity to to get out if i wanted to so it also gave me the chance to not get in bed right away and like if i'm like yo [ __ ] is not what i thought it was i'm out so it gave me a little bit of a side door so i was like [ __ ] it you know and so we went and um everything we talked about everything like bro i i didn't even mention this but those first two and a half three months that i was writing at the studio before the deal was even like a thing i was still releasing a song every day i would release a song after i would i would go to the studio for like a 10 a.m session bang out two to three to four records like hooks some of them full records then come home starving start a brand new [ __ ] record have it done by like midnight out the door by like 1 2 a.m like i did that for like two months i don't even know how the [ __ ] i did that so i was making there was a point where i was making like three four or five records in a day that's it appease the label appease the label and um and satisfy my my goal which my original goal was to do it for as long as i could but in the back of my mind i wanted to hit a year but then the label [ __ ] came up and i was like this is even better so you know i'ma stop and i remember the president of the label coming into the studio one day and being like yo like this whole song everyday [ __ ] is crazy but i think you should stop and i was like why and he was like like the records are good but imagine if he spent seven days on one record it could be great and i kind of challenged him on it and i was like well i believe in what i'm doing man and i'm not gonna stop until i know that you know i've gotten something out of out of it enough to where it makes sense to stop so i kept going against his his uh his advice um and at that point that was the biggest person i've i had ever been in the room with ever so um minus myself but you know in in hindsight minus yourself in hindsight bro you don't have a lack of confidence that's for sure yo what what is it what is it about that that that concept of releasing a record a day versus releasing you know one ever like do you think that that was the right move at that time um i bro i like do you i think do you regret continuing doing that or no you feel like that was the right move to make i i wanted to keep trying i regret it i regret stopping yeah i regret stopping because had i finished had i did a year yeah i would have had a i would have had something that i would have been really truly proud of i'm like damn yo but you can't tell me[ __ ] i dropped the record for a whole year you know um but i felt i felt like at the time i was doing it for i was stopping for you know like i felt like i had it served its purpose the purpose was in practice to hone my craft and dedicate myself but also to yield a result because i felt like for the last uh 13 years at the time because now it's been 15 years since i've been making music but for the last 13 years at that time i had been running through the jungle trying to get out and it's like by that point when you're 13 years in trying to get out the jungle man i don't give a [ __ ] if my boots are[ __ ] up i don't give a [ __ ] if like my shirt is ripped and like i'm bleeding and my arm is like dead like i'm just i'm going full speed until something changes yeah you know so like that's how i felt because i was almost like my body was just like like almost like a zombie like i was i felt like a zombie i was losing so much sleep and like i wasn't eating right and then you know having issues with like the basic needs of like surviving food [ __ ] my relationship like you know like bro like it was crazy you know so i didn't want to stop until i knew something resulted some there was a result from it you know you sacrificed too much yeah so so no i didn't want to stop but but ultimately i did because then i felt like the deal was the game changer yeah what's the bill happened i thought like my life was going to change forever literally i thought that was the moment you know so um yeah so what's next you got a record deal you got a record deal they're not paying out the way they need to pay out it's a trial basis they want to get married but they're not sure right yeah so the first red flag was that we had talked about covering my basic living expenses and they were like yo the number's a little too high but we could work with you on that like we got you well we'll give you something on a monthly basis so you can you know cover your basics when once we signed that was out the door so they didn't so they they told you they were gonna do something they and they didn't do it yeah that was the first one and that was just the beginning um those two and a half months of initial songwriting was i was writing for g eazy's um i was writing for uh who else was i writing for the biggest name at that time that i was writing for was g-e-z um i wasn't with him in the studio and i wasn't like with his crew or anything like that but the label had a strong relationship with his label and team and they were accepting records directly from them for his album um so i was writing with the intent from the label and my perspective of like yo we're going to place these records um and you know that nothing never heard anything about that so like i had i still got all the songs obviously but i have like probably 60 to 75 songs that i made within that time period that are just sitting like because i recorded them to other producers beats which were names bigger names at the time and it was all because they were promising to get placements for those records and that it benefited us when we were pitching them to have a bigger producer name attached to that pitch you know to that hook so wasted wasted content you know so hold on hold on i'm a little confused about this so they're they're they're telling these producers that they're going to place these records with big names correct yeah so yeah so you're you're you're getting you're writing hooks for beats from these specific producers but but they're not getting the names is that what the issue is they're not getting the placements they're not getting the placements why aren't they getting the placements that's that's what i was asking myself because this is supposed to be the two the the heads of this label were supposed to be the two two of some of the biggest names of music and like people that like produce for dr dre eminem like you know like big [ __ ] names you know so like you know two times platinum you know like it's just like i was like what's what's happening what's going on like why are we not why are we not even getting in the room in the studio with these people and it was just you know anybody who's in the if you're outside of a business it's like how could this be how can this happen you know like but when you're inside the business like this is common practice they give you the the typical run around like oh man we sent the email the the manager is out of town he's in chicago for two weeks so so what is it though the artist doesn't the artist doesn't want to take the record is that what it is i don't even know if the artist listens to the records because they never they never gave me a yo he heard it you know he passed yeah i never even got that and that would have been a respectable thing that's a common thing yeah you know but i didn't even get that um i remember i was i was sending hooks out for meeks meek's album at the time and it was like the the head of the label had a direct line to meek and like he couldn't even tell me whether or not he couldn't even confirm whether or not he sent it um he just told me that they passed on on his beat that he sent with asap ferg on the hook and like all this i was like crazy [ __ ] and i'm just like all right because at that time you know the relationship is still new so you don't want to like start stepping on toes and[ __ ] you know you kind of gotta like play the game a little bit so you know i try to stay calm and collected and not focus too much on that[ __ ] you know yeah so what so you're making all this music is basically getting shelved that's where you're at yeah basically like like like a lot of music 78 tracks or something like that right yeah so where where are you at in this process how far into your one year deal with with the record company are you um so it wasn't a one-year deal it just had a a one-year period where once that one year was fulfilled either party can decide whether or not they want to continue i understand and move on to it so you got an option an exit option yeah so um so once the placements weren't kind of getting placed the focus moved on to like all right let's start getting your singles ready i had so much music so much music that they were like yo send me a folder of like the best songs that you had before the deal that you want me to hear and we'll see if we can rework them and re-release them with like some real muscle like on a major on a major release sure so we did that and we found a solid 15 to 20 records then we boiled that down to like a solid 12. so for like six to seven or eight months i was i was um perfecting and rearranging and like relaying down verses like oh you know this verse is tight but like let's redo this one uh like let's lay down this hook with like different harmonies you know like i was taking direction because in my eyes i'm like yo these [ __ ] know what the [ __ ] they're doing yeah and i've been doing i've been trying my way for 13 years something ain't clicking so let me try something else you know like for once um so i did all that eventually worked on new singles did all that and then and then we picked like three or four records that we were gonna launch as like singles for an ep that was gonna have like like eight songs on it or something like that and um basically man that's where like [ __ ] really got messy because i delivered on my on my behalf the music was there everything was great they thought it was fire like then once we started getting the details for the music video and we had the major label partner involved which was island records um which is under uh universal music group um once all that kind of like came together it was like when things really started to fall apart because i started to realize all the holes and the [ __ ] that they promised and what they weren't delivering on and so that's when i started to become like oh okay what what what was happening what were those holes what were the holes um so so we were supposed to get a uh we were supposed to launch the first single november of 2018. november turned into like oh you know what thanksgiving is coming up and then the whole music industry takes holiday so they shut down uh in december so december's not a good month either let's shoot for the end of january because it gives people time to come back from vacation and then the offices start up and running again so like end of january end of january turns into middle of february like oh you know let's make sure we give people enough time then february turns to march march turns into april april turns into may may 31st so we went from november from supposedly because they were like they were gun hoe about the whole thing like yo november we're we're launching november two we're launching the album and this is gonna be like a single single the first single right first single of the ep um that all that turns into [ __ ] may 31st the first single finally comes out no press no press release the way that that it was supposed to be done what they ended up doing was they ended up calling in a favor last minute the day of for a write-up on lyrical lemonade that's what they ended up doing that [ __ ] don't count in my book not for not for the kind of work that i put in um the video was a [ __ ] disaster i ended up having to color correct the video my [ __ ] self and that video was like 10 bands i think more than that crazy like 12 grand like the [ __ ] the directors bro they disappeared in the middle of the process like we didn't have the video nothing and like we we had to push our launch date back so this was one of those holes where i'm like yo you all are the label you hired them how the [ __ ] are they just like disappeared and you can't do anything about it and and all this money like um so what that was the whole thing what is the issue is it are they just not managing the situation correctly like what's the problem i don't understand i'm i'm gonna button this up and it's all gonna be clear in a second so i'm just like yo oh hold on one second can you hear me so yeah yeah i can hear you fine i can hear your phone looks like you have everyone's died on you go ahead um i'm like yo how the [ __ ] am i dealing with these people up here yeah i'm out here yeah am i execution and delivery is levels beyond theirs let let me let me just stop you right there let me just stop you right there you're you're 13 years into a craft you're working with your money you're learning every aspect of what it is that you need to do on your own of course your level of crap can be different of course bro your the mistake is this a lot of people they think that because they spend a ten thousand dollars on a video they think that that video is better that's not true that's not true i see i i know i know what you know i've been around this for a while you could spend ten time ten times more five times more on a project and you can get a worse result that's a reality there's an incompetent people out there so who's whoever's managing that scenario if they're not if they're not involved in the day-to-day of dealing with these people then you're gonna have you're gonna have a problem that's just reality so so you're you're they spend ten thousand dollars on shooting a video for this record for the single right in the hopes of promoting the album promoting you the artist yeah and you end up having to edit color touch for those of you that don't know color touching is a process of editing the video where you know you you make it look like a mastered finished product in terms of the color and the the general vibe of the video right so yeah you end up having the they paid the money you end up having to fix it so i'm i'm guessing the album re the the the record release you waited six months for it and it gets like a a sloppy rollout yeah super sloppy um and um and basically i decided based on another gut feeling if i forget if it was the day after or like a couple days after the release i decided nah this ain't it i can't put my future in these people's hands it's not only my future it's my family's future all the people that bet on me because i bet on myself first like i'm letting these people down did you i don't did you notice an energy change or like did you notice anything that would signal to you that the management on this side just lost interest in the project so when i when i was first offered the situation the deal there were five artists five artists once i signed a couple weeks later there was two more artists then there was three more artists there and there was four more artists it became a revolving door i understand and i suddenly i realized that oh [ __ ] i came in thinking it was a five-man team you know artist roster and they were thinking of throwing spaghetti at the wall to figure out which one is going to stick yeah they're they're thinking frequency as well just a different type of frequency because what happens is that the industry will take a bunch of [ __ ] that's relatively low cost to see if it'll pop and then the thing that pops they make their initial investment on the [ __ ] that failed back 10 times over sure you know so like it don't even matter to them so the label basically the major label partner island records somebody like them will give money to the jv almost like as an angel investor being like hey you know here's an initial investment you know whether it works out or not like it's all good you know what i mean but but you have a good ear right you're a good filter so we know that you're bringing that [ __ ] that has the potential to go right so that's how it works and so um which is why most artists that you see are not just under universal music group they're like love renaissance and interscope you know like a you know black or you know uh uh westside boogie you know like love renaissance interscope you know so multi multi-labeled deal levels so um that's why meek mill is uh uh what is it uh rich forever or um mmg slash whatever you know what i'm saying so that's how it works so basically i realized that that this [ __ ] became a revolving door and suddenly i didn't matter and so i'm not gonna put the next seven years of my life and my craft and my journey in that [ __ ] whatever that is right so that's when i started to uh plan my exit and um once i saw the release came out it was so sloppy i was like you know what not he's saying that so boom boom call my lawyer everything's a go i write this long ass email basically detailing all the [ __ ] that i went through and observed because i'm an observer all this [ __ ] that i that i realized from the beginning of my deal to 12 months later and and i tagged in the email the label the major label partner which apparently had no idea that these people were running a [ __ ] show they were super [ __ ] pissed because suddenly their [ __ ] show was aired out sure and and basically i had kind of had to fight with them to to be able to even release music again which which is something that a lot of people don't realize when people get into a situation you you can't just go to like release some music again you're under contract exclusively to xyz right so unless you study up and realize where you can get in and get out like you're stuck and here's here's where my gut again uh the circumambulation by carl jung when i had to like realize that i didn't fit in with these people i just had to focus on me when i did that it was on the gut feeling that i knew that that was a sinking ship i'm the first person to leave the label of all those artists and people are making up rumors about me and [ __ ] talking [ __ ] behind my back at the label and all this [ __ ] a couple months later the label dissolves other artists get let go crazy i'm the only one that got that one away that that walked away at the right time because i [ __ ] knew you know what i'm saying i just [ __ ] knew [ __ ] was going downhill next thing i know a couple months later i'm hearing whispers then i run into some people that were there and they're like yo the whole [ __ ] went under it's crazy yeah i'm talking about like up up to like three weeks ago i got a phone call from an artist that was like yo i'm still stuck like they can't they can't do anything so your contractual obligation it doesn't allow you to release music because technically you're under contractual obligation to the label you signed a deal for some people yeah it's crazy and how how long depends on their goal thank god thank god i i was me me and my brother were reading books about music business we were [ __ ] calling our lawyer asking a ton of[ __ ] questions when we negotiated initially thank god we negotiated things that we did because excuse me it gave us some some wiggle room sure um and lo and behold that was kind of our saving grace you know and so a lot of records that i was i was working on i ended up releasing my stuff and got got back into the swing of releasing a record every week more or less but i realized a lot of[ __ ] man and i walked away from that a stronger artist it took me i got a comment on this because man i i'm one of those people that i'm very hesitant to give depression a legitimate disease kind of label because i don't i'm not i'm not downplaying it at all i'm not saying it's not a real thing and i'm not disregarding the people that actually deal with this but for me personally i'm very hesitant about the kind of power that i give the term and label depression i don't i don't i'm not that kind of person so but what i will say is that after this whole [ __ ] happened bro like my whole journey like felt like a waste because i just wasted a year of my life when i felt like i was at the peak of my momentum you know what i mean i went into at the peak of my momentum and came out like like nothing like nothing like i didn't do anything and that [ __ ] hurt me man well i i can't say that i mean i i can't speak for you bro that the way you feel is the way you feel but yeah looking at it from the outside from the outside perspective i can't say that it's a total loss because you learn so much more about the con the contract side of things the business everything i know about the business is because of that sure so you know i saw the inside i saw how the machine works yeah so there's there's marketing there's distribution there's all kinds of things that you would not have uh you just you wouldn't have access to if you weren't involved in that situation yeah so let me let me ask you a question you know there's going to be people watching this right now and they're they're thinking about becoming an artist and they're thinking about moving to california they're thinking about moving to new york what what advice would you have for somebody like that that that is at that point in their life you know what would what would you say to them two things the first thing is um i spoke to lionel richie a couple days ago because he comes into my job um a lot and um i asked him like you know mr richie you know what kind of advice would you have for a young man you know chasing his his dream in music so he was like um like ownership basically ownership he says right now more importantly than ever the music industry is about to undergo a huge dramatic shift soon very soon and you need to be fighting to be an owner and it resonated with everything that i that i had came to conclude in my journey which was that if you're not a owner you're not in the game not in the future of the game at least you know so um how do you develop how do you develop ownership in such a such a complicated industry like distribution like this there's only two things you're either doing good or you're doing bad and the people that you think are doing good you don't really know you don't really know what these people are going through because fifty thousand dollars ain't [ __ ] a hundred thousand dollars ain't [ __ ] once it's taxed once you pay so and so and your lawyer and everything that a hundred thousand dollars is nothing right it's like you make more money working at [ __ ] ralph lauren right you know what i'm saying and and you can't work with anybody else you can't appear in a movie without permission you can't do an ad without permission can't do [ __ ] you're locked like you're locked in right so these people are living on debt yeah i'm saying and they're going from one debt to another debt because once they're once their one deal ends they go to another get another advance and end up in debt again then they go to another one i don't even know how this[ __ ] how people get away with this [ __ ] but you know ultimately people leverage the other things that come with the music and they end up giving away their ownership of the music at what cost at not being able to be an owner to where you could pass something on to your kids and that to me is the most selfish thing that you could [ __ ] do because it's like bro you you broke the cycle to give it away like to throw away the key for the next man yeah in your own lineage you know what i mean so like that [ __ ] don't make any sense so how so so what would you what would you what advice would you give to somebody looking to get into the record industry my advice is that you don't need to be in la right now the only thing keeping me in la is that that's not only my my decision to make because my partner you know my my girlfriend my love she also has a life sure she's excelling in la she's doing great things she's doing big things so i can't make that decision for the both of us and at the same time you know there's nothing in jersey for me right now so like you know i kind of like gotta i don't have any place to go so like i might as well just continue to grind here and there's there is the added benefit of meeting people and stuff like that but i'm no longer in that business of yo if i just talk to kanye and like he hears a song like i'm no longer in that in that frame of mind so it doesn't even matter you know i meet people every day and i don't even mention that i make music because that's just not the game the game is even if you're in nebraska [ __ ] idaho or[ __ ] alaska make your music understand who you're making it for and put it out there and don't be attached to the end result yeah because when you're striving the only thing you see is that end result and you miss all the other things that could be the break so you really feel like being an independent artist is really the angle to go to this this day and age it's the future it's the future the way that um you know being a boutique um clothing store is the future yeah you get what i'm saying like you got people you got people like cap swag which you know i don't mean to say boutique in in a way that makes it seem small because it's not but it's like you're grassroots you're like from the bottom i appreciate that you are going to survive anything that comes in this economy like i called you and you're telling me like yo i'm blessed like my business grew yeah in a time where everybody's business is going under you get what i'm saying like it don't matter what the [ __ ] comes next you're gonna survive because you're small compared to the giants you're nimble you understand how everything works kind of like how i understand every aspect of my business and craft you understand every aspect of your business and craft so you know what to do where you can cut you you don't have [ __ ] jobs in between and like all this other extra[ __ ] so being an independent artist means you're in control of navigating and re responding to whatever happens what the market does yeah not waiting for a [ __ ] 200 foot yacht to make a hard u-turn because there's an ice glacier yeah in front of them you're a jet ski you can move yeah yeah you're just a jet ski you can shift if you see something yeah and plus the thing about uh being an independent artist is that you can leverage things that are that that as a result of the content become a source of income you can leverage those things and have the content as a source of income versus major artists they can't leverage their music because their music is not owned by them yeah being milked by the system so they have to they have to depend on these club appearances they have to depend on these [ __ ] festivals they can't leverage they have to make a clothing line they have to do all this other [ __ ] because they can't even depend on the music and the music is the one thing that is like real estate that's supposed to feed your kids for generations that's that's their core that's that's their art that's who they are and and and it's signed away so let me let me ask you this question here did why why would somebody sign with a label at this point well that's what jay-z said in um 444. he said y'all still taking advances y'all still taking advances what does that mean like y'all still taking loans yeah you know saying like that's what it is it's a loan and not only is it alone but they got you by the neck because the very thing that you work so hard to build up is not even yours anymore sure saying so like um being an independent artist is no doubt[ __ ] hard but it's also hard to be in the room and realize that the room is the [ __ ] cell that's crazy the room is the cell so you're out here striving for like 13 years to take yourself into a cell that's crazy so crazy let me ask you this so you put that time and you put that year in was there anything in that year that brought you a lot of value in terms of distribution of content right because now you're on your own you're an independent right so you're moving you're doing your own thing and me and you talk a lot about business and you have you have your eyes open to a lot more things than you used to so in terms of content distribution what did you walk away with as lessons learned one thing i learned is that uh labels don't know what the[ __ ] to do any more than you do as an independent artist what labels have is capital with capital you can put anything in front of most people and that's what they do literally we were sitting at a [ __ ] round table well a conference table a long one coming up with ideas and i'm over here racking my brain like i would be in my room by myself yeah these [ __ ] like been in the room with the biggest [ __ ] names yeah you know what the [ __ ] they're doing any more than you do they just have the ability to put capital behind them you put capital behind it but i realized that wow like they don't know what they're doing and that's why they failed they they couldn't they didn't make anybody blow up plus think about the music industry like this this how for any artist why do you think they're not picking up artists that don't have traction because they don't know what the [ __ ] to do to get the traction they're only picking up machines that are already in motion because you did the hard work of getting in motion sure and then on top of that everybody is in the business of keeping their job so the last [ __ ] thing on earth that they're gonna do no matter how fire your music is is risky take chance on you because then that means they're taking a chance on their rent not getting paid in la one of the most expensive cities to live in in the world yeah it's crazy that's the business nobody's taking chances everybody's playing it safe and when everybody's playing it safe that means more of the same that means they're not signing the next drake they're signing the next copy they're signing the next [ __ ] look alike the next cover artist they're not signing the next new thing the next new thing is coming from the guy in the bedroom that just puts it out and people just the people the people make him the champion sure sure so so you set up you talked about ownership how are you going to get ownership and what it is that you're doing moving for obviously you're an independent artist you have ownership or whatever you're doing but what is ownership to you what does that word mean to you yeah so um so real quick i'm gonna answer that and i'm also gonna say that the only reason people are signing deals today is because they don't know what that comes with and they think that notoriety means dollars and they think that notoriety comes attached to the contract it definitely doesn't do you know how many people are signed in california finding assigned artists to a major record label in california is like finding a gas station in any town it's it's everywhere and then you ask yourself wow how come i've never heard of your music your sign with republic oh you're signed with warner oh you've been writing for this bill how come you're not touring how come you're not selling albums how come you're not selling merch because because just because you got a deal doesn't mean[ __ ] changes right makes things harder you know so so ownership to me means this robert kiyosaki uh rich dad poor dad talks about assets and liabilities an asset by definition not by the financial world's definition but by true definition is something that puts money in your pocket while a liability is something that takes money out of your pocket if i make a song tonight and that song goes on to make thirty five dollars over the course of the next six months but i also make 42 other songs that make ten dollars tier five dollars there twenty dollars here fifteen dollars there i could have a thousand dollars a month in positive cash flow that's my rent you know what i'm saying like as an owner you know it's like you don't invest into a stock and like expect it to make you 20 000 in the next two months you build up over time so what you do is you build a catalog and the ownership of that catalog creates a yield that will hopefully be a positive yield over the course of years that will feed you and your family forever so even if that catalog produces 5 000 a month over the journey of 20 years or something like that i mean 5 000 a month off of just one single income stream is that's a lot of money yeah when you you're not even factoring factoring in all the other things like shows merchandise which you get to keep all of yeah you know there are access like lessons you know things that you can do these are all things that i'm moving into and then i took i've taken a lot of time to to educate myself on so that i could better understand what it really does mean to be an owner right why independent is the way to go for me so think about it in terms of that do you need to reach a million people no no we need 1 000 people that will spend a hundred dollars a year on your product your music in the in the form of a 45 hoodie uh ten dollar album and a 25 show ticket and a thirty dollar [ __ ] um you know merchandise kit a hundred dollars one fan one thousand that's a hundred thousand dollars a year yeah so let that's what being an owner means let people know how they can they can support your craft how can they ever support you as an artist right now um so people can support me by um paying for the things that i offer you know so whether it's music you know streaming is not enough to be honest buy an album ten dollars you know um tell your friend to buy an album that's 20. um put a friend on and tell him to check out the merchandise on the website so we're gonna we're gonna drop a link in the in the description for kev um so that you can check out his merchandise you can check out some of his music uh i think you know for me there's some valuable lessons here bro in terms of contractual obligations for the artists there's a lot of valuable lessons here i think one of the most valuable lessons i know of is uh you know you follow your dreams bro you can never be wrong by doing that nobody can judge anybody for the decisions that they make with their life their their life right the other aspect of the valuable lesson that i take away from this is i mean i've always i've known this for a very long time ownership is key and whatever you do in life if you're going to do it find a way to boss up right so if it's creating content if it's getting involved in a business and carving yourself your niche within that business i mean listen not we talk a lot about entrepreneurial uh strive and building yourself right that's not always that's not always great for some people if you work for a company you can boss up the way you can boss up with a company is you carve a niche within that company and say listen i'm the greatest at this yeah right you find a way to position your position yourself where you get some equity you find a way to position yourself where you're getting that's something i learned from you i didn't know that that was even possible of course it's possible bro of course it's possible you know you can ask phil that right so like if somebody brings value to the t i mean sometimes people you know that you have to bring the right kind of value to the table you know you have to and sometimes that's a gamble a lot a lot of owners won't do that with the right you know with the person unless they feel like they're buying something of value because then they're they're caught in a situation that they want to be involved in right that's the truth so if you're if you're if you're if you're an owner and you see that somebody brings an a great amount of value to the table there you you're able to leverage that into a relationship ownership is not always i'm gonna go out there and i'm gonna start a business on my own that does not work for everybody that works for some people that's not something that everybody can do corporations are called cooperations for a reason right yeah the guy who owns universal doesn't own the whole thing right there's not a singular owner of universal they're shareholders those shareholders contribute and they hire people to do those jobs that's what ownership is that's what equity is that's what stock is so i feel like that's probably one of the most important lessons you can learn in the music industry outside the music industry bossing up is bossing up you know like people are selling rap snacks now yeah like they're selling [ __ ] noodles and [ __ ] like they're out there you know this is smart you know this is instead of giving it to a cup of noodle you know who owns that master p is that who owns that rap snacks i'm not sure but i i know it's somebody's well they're bossing up they're bossing up ownership ownership take a position invest your money ownership too here's one other thing i want to say about ownership before we wrap this up ownership is you have to be willing to risk your money or your time if you're not willing to risk your money or your time then nobody's gonna nobody's gonna take a chance on you if you wanna be an owner for free you're in the wrong business you gotta put something in you either have to have the cash or you have to put the sweat equity in if you're not willing to do both you're a liability and nobody's giving you anything for that straight up yeah man so so with that being said i want to wrap this up uh i want to thank kev decor um good friend of mine he's really instrumental i mean when you when you when you make contacts throughout throughout your life you begin to see what people's values are what their value is kevin is an amazing artist he's gonna continue to be an amazing artist he's got an amazing eye for for content look out look out for future content coming out from him and look out for a few collabo uh projects that we're working on together so thank you for watching tune in episode three coming soon thank you kevin for being on there thank you man it's been an honor i appreciate that mohammed um i really [ __ ] with cap swag and your whole movement thank you man look at it as an empire i respect it thank you man i appreciate that uh you put me on to rich dad poor dad we hadn't talked in a while i finished it should change my [ __ ] whole perspective on finances i called you we reconnected and i'm glad we did because um i realized that i need people in my corner that have done [ __ ] and you're one of those people i appreciate that there's not many people that i can call and say yo i know somebody i know a business person i know somebody who's been through this who's done that um and really do what the [ __ ] they talk about so um thank you for having me um my my website is uh is being updated right now but you can expect to find it at kevdacore.com i'm working on a new album um i got a lot of great great projects coming um if you don't see anything new be patient is definitely coming before the year is up so you know it's going to be a great[ __ ] journey and i look forward to the the podcast and the future episodes they're going to be crazy you guys are watching the hustleman show make sure you like subscribe link below for kev decor link below for spotify and audio experience thanks for watching and remember business is always personal[Music] so you