00:21 CJ: Welcome to The Savvy Musician Show. This is CJ Ortiz. I’m the branding and mindset coach here at The Savvy Musician Academy. Man, I’m excited to be hosting this podcast because I get to do so many cool things. And one of them is I get to talk to students. And what makes this particular episode doubly enjoyable for me is that this is a very good friend of mine. And I’m going to tell a very brief story about my good friend after I introduce him. But I think you’ll see why this is such a cool happenstance in the universe. And again, I’m delighted to have my dear friend, Ty Richards, on The Savvy Musician Show. Ty, good to see you, man.

01:03 Ty: Yo, what’s up, CJ?

01:05 CJ: And for those who have been in the elite coaching calls, they have already met Ty because I keep bringing Ty in every time he shows up on the coaching calls because of our friendship. Now I want you guys to listen very closely because this is kind of a cool, I’ll keep it very, very brief, but a very, very cool story. I met Ty, I want to say as far back as 2013. And so it’s been a long time. And Ty and I both worked for a mutual client, I guess you could say. Our arrangement was different.

He was a little bit more of a vendor. I was working more as a barter thing, so I was handling the entertainment and promotion marketing for a very successful music venue, restaurant/bar. They basically owned about a block of real estate, and it was in the Fort Worth area in Texas. And Ty was doing a lot of the corporate identity work, in other words logos and stuff like that. He was doing menus and handling the website. So as I was handling dates and stuff, Ty, I would give you information and we would kind of work behind the scenes on things.

02:16 Ty: Yeah. We were always working in tandem on that.

02:18 CJ: So of course, I had no idea Ty played music or anything about his personal life, so we would just end up at staff meetings together and team meetings together. Whatever the owner, should we say, Ty knows why I’m laughing. Ty was working in the chaos, just like I was. And we should both, bro, get a rubber cookie for our stint during that time.

02:48 Ty: That was crazy. I mean, that whole world is crazy, though. I mean, if you look at any venue, the amount of drama that happens around any venue is usually very high.

03:02 CJ: So yeah, this was a high on steroids.

03:04 Ty: Yeah.

03:06 CJ: So anyway, Ty and I met back then. And then, I don’t know, two or three years later or so, you’re still basically around when I’d hit you up for certain things. You moved, relocated to Austin. And next thing I know, this is probably, I don’t know, 2015 or 2016, I’m online. And of course, I know Leah. I’m not working with The Savvy Musician Academy, but I know Leah very well. And so I would see her ads and promotions on my social media news feeds. And the next thing I know, there’s Ty Richards. And I’m thinking, “What in the world is the graphics and web developer doing featured on The Savvy Musician Academy?” And so of course, I had to immediately stop and find out. And all of a sudden, I find out this huge secret life that Ty has, secret to me, but not secret to apparently a whole bunch of other people, that Ty is a student in The Online Musician at The Savvy Musician Academy. Now, Ty, how did that happen?

04:09 Ty: Yeah. It was definitely a-

04:11 CJ: Because I was booking music entertainment and you never said a word.

04:16 Ty: It was a collision of worlds. So I had been, I probably, I don’t know, three or four years before I met you, I was really, I was as into music as I am now. I wrote probably 200 songs in college.

04:30 CJ: Wow.

04:30 Ty: And playing nonstop, was getting my start at learning how to produce, learning how to record, all that stuff. Got married, had a baby, and I literally did nothing for five straight years. And that was in that time that I met you, so 2010 to 20, I don’t know, ’14 ish, did nothing. And it’s not like I was trying to do nothing. I was busy with babies. I was learning how to be a dad, learning how to be a husband, learning how to take care of finances, buy a house, all that. I was learning how to adult, basically. And honestly, that was one of the best times for me because it gave me the … I started a business in that time as well. That’s when I started my own design firm.

And it gave me what I needed going into Leah’s course. So by the time I met Leah, same way, I didn’t know Leah at all. But I did see her ads. I think she hit me with one of those. Now I know all the inner workings of ads and how they work, but she hit me with one of those probably friends of friends ads, where my friend, Suzanna Choffel, I saw that she had liked something. And if Suzanna liked this, Suzanna Choffel’s an awesome here in Austin. She was on The Voice and stuff too. We shared the same publicist for a while. And so if Suzanna liked this, I should check it out. And sure enough, I checked it out, and it struck a chord with me. It’s time to get serious about this stuff.

I was halfway done with an album, and I was just trudging through it. And Leah, that class is really kind of the fire under my butt that I needed to get the album done and get the album marketed. I had zero fans in my whole life of being in bands and stuff until that point, until I think two months of doing her course, I built up. I went from zero to 10,000 fans on Facebook. And I went from zero to about 2000 people on my email list.

06:36 CJ: Wow.

06:37 Ty: Yeah. That just, I don’t know, man.

06:40 CJ: That’s a weird feeling. Isn’t it?

06:42 Ty: Yeah. It’s weird, especially after you try really hard and nothing happens for 10 years. So before I got married, it was a solid all of high school and all of college of just busting my butt at gigs, promoting, web. That’s how I learned how to build websites in the first place, was I’d do it partially, mostly for a living for now. But that’s how I learned how to do that in high school and college was doing it for the band. Somebody’s got to design the T-shirts. Somebody’s got to design the album artwork. Somebody’s got to design the website. Somebody’s got to do everything, and that ended up being me for most of that.

07:23 CJ: Well, let me just ask you about what we’ve just talked about a little bit, as we’re both drinking. Are you slamming coffee out of a Yeti silver mug? Dude, is it literally the same one?

07:37 Ty: It’s not coffee. This is a knock off Yeti. It’s called a Kodi. Sponsored by.

07:42 CJ: Are you serious? Anyway, double the rabbit trail. But I wanted to go back to this thing about the fans thing. You said you went 10 years, nobody knows about you for that aspect of you music wise, outside of I’m sure friends and family. So does that shape your outlook on what’s possible? In other words, the idea of having 10,000 fans on social media, and then 1000 people on a mailing list. Was that in your mind like skipping the Grand Canyon? How do you jump from nobody knowing me to all of a sudden that many people connecting with you?

08:17 Ty: Yeah. I think the numbers were interesting, but more enough, it was just the actual interaction. I’d never had people. We played shows and we’d have the occasional people that are like, “Hey, man. We really like your band.” And you put the little email list paper out on the merch table, and you might have a few little names on it or whatever. But no one really cares. It’s seen as more of like a charity type thing. You go to your friends shows because that’s what you do, you be a good friend. It has nothing to do with this band is freaking awesome, and if I don’t see them, my life will end.

08:52 CJ: So I better give them my email address to keep in touch.

08:55 Ty: Yeah. And so this level, Leah had talked about in the course that you might run across people that they’re going to be really excited that they found you. And they’re going to be … And sure enough, there were people who were mad they hadn’t found me earlier.

09:13 CJ: Wow.

09:14 Ty: That’s how extreme it was. It was like, “Dude, how did I not know about you?” How do people not know about, that’s how excited they were.

09:22 CJ: Isn’t that a paradigm shift? Because that is something when Leah talks about super fans, that it’s hard for that coin to drop sometimes with people. It’s hard for them to imagine because like you said, with you, they’ve been slaving for years, whether in bars, or on their own, even try. They set up a Facebook page, posted some events. They don’t get any traction. They’ve had 200 followers for six years on Facebook. Nobody does anything great. It must be some kind of trick. That must’ve been a radical paradigm shift to say, “No, there are people out there who are wishing.” A guy said, “I wish I would’ve known you earlier.” So right now, they are wishing to know you, they just haven’t come across you yet. That’s got to be radical.

10:08 Ty: Yeah. Honestly, I don’t think I was ready for it. And then what came after it too, that was the first domino, getting those 10,000 people and the 1000, or the 2000 email list, and just people regularly reaching out to me. I wasn’t ready for that, and I definitely wasn’t ready. I’m glad you guys do the mindset coaching now because this is TOM 1.0 times. This is, I don’t know when. Am I doing 2015, 2016?

10:33 CJ: Yeah. That’s back when Leah just taught calculator and the stopwatch app.

10:47 Ty: It was good. I still use all of the techniques from that. My brain was not ready for it though. My brain was not ready for what … If I knew everything that was going to happen, I probably would’ve not done it, or I would’ve just freaked out because it dominoed for sure.

11:06 CJ: Well, and I was so again taken aback because I didn’t know that this was the other half of your life. Of course, I was delighted to know that. And then it was a joy, Ty, to get that front-row seat to just watch what you were doing because I was following to some degree because now you were on my feed, so I would see. Man, you were going out and getting on airplanes and stuff, interviewed on radio. Now you had to rethink some of that now. And like we said offline, so much of that has made you who you are now, which we’re going to get to. But you literally did push the envelope. You got public relations people involved and you started, again, interviews and live gigs across the country. It’s kind of amazing, man.

11:57 Ty: Thanks, man. Yeah, it accelerated really fast. And I took some things that Leah said and I … What do they say? I 10 X’ed it.

12:09 CJ: You 10 X’ed it.

12:09 Ty: I 10 X’ed it. I think I 10 X’ed the wrong things though. So she has this checklist of all these things you need to knock out for prelaunch, for those pre, pre-launch. There’s prelaunch, there’s launch. There’s post-launch and this whole process. And I talked about this to her a while back, but I took notes with a to-do list. I took notes with this app called Trello. And so instead of just taking notes, I’m putting down actionable stuff out of every lesson. And I made, I don’t know, I made a checklist on steroids.

But yeah, when it got to the PR item, man, she was like, “You need to reach out to a PR company,” blah, blah, blah. And I was like, “Okay.” And that was a minor step for her. For me, for whatever reason, I did the steps of I found 10 or 20 contacts and started reaching out to people. Literally no one got back to me out of the 20 that I contacted. And so there wasn’t some magical thing that I did to get an awesome publicist, other than I happened to be playing some gigs with these other musicians, and they had a PR contact, and you need to call this person. They’re the best person in Austin. And I was like, “All right. I’ve already tried 20. Let’s try 21. It won’t hurt.”

So I sent the same thing I sent the other ones, and I sent … But part of that was because of Leah’s course, I had my ducks in a row. I had the website. I had the bio. I had that social media built up. I had campaigns going. I had things, it was already put together and ready for a publicist to kind of run with it. The album is done. The album artwork is done. Everything’s ready to go. And sure enough, the publicist freaked out, was like, “Yeah, I’ve got to work with you now. Let’s do this.” And it was one of the biggest publicists in Austin.

Yeah, long story short, I could go into all these little parts if we want to later, but what it dominoed into was I had built up those 10,000 fans off of two songs. I didn’t even have an album out. I didn’t have one album out yet. So I built up all this momentum with just two songs. And then I had the album ready to go, and I’m handing it off to the publicist. And by the end of that album cycle, I was on, I don’t know, 90 college stations. I’m charting on every station.

14:40 CJ: Wow.

14:41 Ty: I’m in top 10, top 20, top 30, somewhere in those ranges. I’m in the top 20 of probably 25 different stations in California, which is that’s music mecca. People can say Nashville, or Austin, or whatever, but Los Angeles and that area is actual music mecca when it comes to music licensing. And that’s where all the music business is happening when it comes to entertainment and entertainment industry. Yeah, so long story short, I was number four, USA Today. So I was number four college album in the country. The day that I put out my record, the day that I put it out, I’m artist of the month.

15:24 CJ: Oh, my gosh.

15:25 Ty: No. That’s what it was. The day I put it out, I was given an NPR … The NPR station here in Austin had me do a studio session with them, where they did this whole taping and everything. That was the day that I put the record out. That’s what it was, a month after that was South by Southwest. And they dubbed me the artist of the month during South by Southwest. And for anyone in Austin, that’s the holy grail thing to get. You can’t get a bigger thing. That’s the goal. And there’s not really a goal in Austin that’s higher than that PR wise. You could whatever, play the Paramount, play The Continental Club. Those are live gig goals. But as far as PR goals, that was it.

And that was on pretty much day one of album number one. And yeah, so I ended up doing a West Coast tour later that year in the summer, and did a radio tour and hit all these radio stations in California, and kind of on and on and on. All these articles written about you. It was just weird because even successful albums that I had heard from other artists weren’t that successful. The momentum was still going four, five, six months after the album was dropped, which is weird. Usually, you get some excitement for a month max, maybe two months. And it was just cool, man. I’m seeing myself on the charts with some of my favorite bands. I’m seeing Ty Richards, Ryan Adams, The Shins.

Depending on when the records drop, it’d be funny because it would be like, “Oh, I’m beating Ryan Adams.” But Ryan Adams’ album had been out for six months or something. It was just kind of a fun game to play, but I think that was my takeaway from all of it though, was I did that with album number one. And I guess I’ll get to the takeaway in a second because I basically did it again with the second album. I did a second album one year afterwards, so I released an album called Zillion. That’s the first album. And then I released an album called Welcome to Flat Earth. And my goal was to kind of just repeat the process and keep going. But the whole time, I’m kind of ignoring things. There’s things I had gone through in Leah’s class that she talks about shiny object syndrome. Right?

And dude, I had it full on at this point because to me it’s like, PR, radio, PR, radio. Oh, yeah, I’ve got a store. You can buy my records. I’ve got social media. All that other stuff was on the back burner. And even after I had raised those, built up those 10,000 fans and the 2000 emails, I got so distracted by the famey-ness of all the other stuff, that I gave it zero time and zero effort for the rest of the actual business, the rest of the actual e-Commerce side. And yeah, man, it came to kind of show me I didn’t even understand the function of PR or the function or radio promotion.

And now this one record company guy that I was talking to, he used to work at A and R for Universal or something. I was talking to him and he was like, “Yeah, PR doesn’t give you record sales.” And it kind of hit me in the face of, no, it really doesn’t. The function of PR is for top of mind awareness. It’s for you’re not a thing, and then PR makes you a thing, and that’s it. It doesn’t really equate to fans or equate to super fans. It doesn’t equate to people buying stuff. It doesn’t equate to record sales at all.

19:06 CJ: And that’s where the leverage comes in of, especially the online presence. I mean, God forbid you had to try and do this back in the days before the internet or before social media. So not to say that PR is bad or any of that, but PR and live gigs and all that with a very strong type of social media and email marketing type thing as taught via The Savvy Musician Academy would’ve left you with so many of those fans on a dedicated mailing list buying God knows what from Ty.

19:40 Ty: Yeah. So I think really I was over-leveraged in that because, I don’t know, I mean, to be truthful, it’s like I was kind of getting a big head about it. I got so distracted and allured by the, I don’t know, fame.

19:56 CJ: Famey-ness was a great way to say it.

19:57 Ty: I don’t know how else to say it other than that. It’s like fame has never been a goal of mine, but it’s seductive when you get that amount of validation for music that you’ve made. It’s like I know my music’s good. Any musician who is good on some level knows that they’re good and knows that they’re making something good. But when you get that amount of validation to go with it, it’s almost like the scales tip because it’s … I don’t know. There’s always this dichotomy of … What do you call it? Egotistical-ness, egotistic versus extreme doubt, like I’m not good enough. It’s like I know I’m good enough and I know I’m awesome. And then everyone else is telling me I’m awesome.

20:44 CJ: That’s dangerous.

20:45 Ty: Dude, it is a dangerous place because I just … Yeah. I let it kind of lead me astray from what I initially set out to do because what I initially set out to do, album number one was to build up a business, build up a business, build up record sales that could sustain record, after record, after record. And I’m back on that path now. I’m excited about that. But I need to fight distractions at all costs.

21:14 CJ: Well, you know it’s funny you say that because we joked offline before we started this interview. I said, “Ty, I think I’m going to call this one The Prodigal Son Comes Home.” And in some weird way, it kind of does tell the story a bit, where it’s not coming home in the sense that he had forsaken anything that he was taught. No, it was the shiny object, which if you want to describe a shiny object, that’s textbook shiny object. That’s something that’s going to get everybody. There’s nobody that sits there, “Oh, I wouldn’t be moved by all that fame and attention and records appearing on the record charts.” Yes, you would. Any of you would.

But I love the fact that I love your sense of humility to say, “Okay, well, I’m still a realist. And I want to have a future, and my family’s getting larger and they’re depending upon me to be a breadwinner.” And so you start to move back. Now when did you? Because all of a sudden, you suddenly appeared one day on an elite coaching call. And I go, “That’s Ty.” When was that? That was several months ago.

22:21 Ty: February, yeah.

22:24 CJ: So anyway, so Ty shows up, and this was before COVID-19 and all of that. And so Ty is basically telling me a similar story. And I’m excited because, and this is something again we talked about offline, we don’t want to beat the bush too much, but Ty’s a very multifaceted individual, apparently, because I didn’t know he played music.

22:46 Ty: Very compartmentalized when I’m dealing with … So I run an agency as well. And it’s like when I’m doing business, and I’m very professional. I don’t bring up personal stuff. I don’t bring up other business stuff or other, so I’m very [crosstalk 00:23:05].

23:04 CJ: Multiple storefronts, right?

23:06 Ty: Yeah. There’s no way that you would know that I’m a musician.

23:11 CJ: Exactly. But one of the things that great is, Ty, like myself, you and I share this, is that our different storefronts serve one another. They help one another. And so for you, we both have the art background. We both have the design background. So it helps when you’re running your own show to be able to do these sorts of things, be able to take care of your own artwork and what have you. And so that’s how come you were ready on the spot when the PR agent was there. Everything was ready to go because you didn’t have to wait on anybody else. Right?

23:45 Ty: Yeah.

23:46 CJ: Able to get everything done yourself. And I do the very same thing.

23:51 Ty: That’s one of the reasons why I like making records the way I do too, because I just don’t have to run decisions by anyone. I can just do everything.

23:58 CJ: And let me just ask as an, again, going back to the story that you just told. Looking back on it now with the chart-topping type stuff, getting on the charts and having this type of airplay, what have you. What do you think it was? I mean, we know the music’s good. But is there anything you can point to? Is it the genre? Was it an album cover? Was it something you … I mean, something must’ve been picking up with all of this that-

24:30 Ty: This is what I think. So there’s all these elements that are going into it. Right? You’ve got the graphic design. You’ve got the music. You’ve got the sound. You’ve got the instrumentation of the music. You’ve got the way the music is mixed. You’ve got the way the PR campaign is being rolled out. You’ve got a way that the radio promo is rolling out, the social media, all that stuff. I think the more that stuff can be kind of unified, you talk about this all the time with branding, the more it can kind of all tell the same story and all really just be very clear, very to the point, we’ve talked about this. It’s like a good joke. If the joke is just landing immediately, then people just get it. You’re not making people figure out what the crap is going on, so I think that was a big part of it, was the album cover. When you look at Zillion, you can look at the album cover. You can look. It’s me in a spacesuit.

25:21 CJ: It’s so creative, man.

25:22 Ty: It’s just weird. You’re like, “What the hell?” This guy’s just in a spacesuit and he’s trying to drink coffee through his … And so, I don’t know, that and just kind of having a good team in place too. As much as we just talked about how I did everything myself. But at the same time, we all reach a point, and this is different for everybody. For some people, you hit the graphic design part and there’s no way you’re going to just be awesome overnight. You need to hire someone to be awesome at that. Mine, I’ve been doing graphic design for 20 years, so that’s not my point. My point was PR, and I think PR is probably a lot of people’s point too, where it’s like, “I’m not going to go make phone calls all day, every

Actually, it was one of those things, I was going to go do that. I actually did the research on: How do I do my own PR? And I looked at the workload that it was going to be and realized that it was not possible for my life. So having a good team in place is one of them too. Another thing was, this sounds kind of weird too, but having the money to do it. I had kind of way too … I’m not going to say it happened just because I had some money, but it freaking helped. I’m just going to say, I put, I was over leveraged in PR. But that is one of the reasons why it happened too. If my songs would’ve sucked, the money wouldn’t have mattered, but my songs were good and I had money. I did two record cycles. And the first record cycle, I actually had two publicists. I had a national publicist and I had the Austin kind of regional publicist.

And yeah, so it’s like you could count on a solid publicist, you could count on about $6000 to $10,000 for one record cycle. And I had the money. We had just sold a house, and honestly, I was an idiot with the money. I was like, “I’ve got some money laying around.” It’s amazing how fast what you think a pile of money can just disappear. And that’s another cautionary tale of that first album. I was so over leveraged with PR and radio that I hurt my family, man. I sold a house. I think we probably sold it and got whatever it was, like 40 grand out of that. That 40 grand disappeared super fast. And I’ve got kids to feed, it’s not … I laugh about it now because it’s far enough away. But it was hard times.

27:58 CJ: And so now four wives later, you finally learned. No, I’m kidding.

28:05 Ty: At the time, I had three children. At the time of releasing Zillion, I had three children. Now I have six children. We had twins. We had twins, and then we just had a boy about a month ago.

28:15 CJ: Wonderful. Congratulations.

28:17 Ty: I have six children. And to me, I see the Savvy Musician stuff and building my business as an e-Commerce business, it was a necessity before, but now it’s a definite necessity where it’s like I can’t play music for a living unless I do it this way. If I choose to play around like I did before, I can dump another 20 grand into stuff again and do it again. But guess what, I’m just going to be hurting my family some more. And I’m not going to be able to live. I’m not going to be able to financially survive. And so if I have a store that’s generating 100 bucks a day, 50 to 100 bucks a day, or if I can build it up over the course of a few years to be bringing in 200, 300 bucks a day, dude, my life is totally changed.

29:14 CJ: And you’re with someone like Leah, who is such an inspiration because for her, it’s like, if she heard you say that, oh, we’ll double that.

29:27 Ty: Yeah. That’s like 100 bucks a day. When you’re going from zero, 100 sounds like a lot because it is. And it’s game-changing. It’s like whatever that is, I think it’s $36,000 or whatever. But the way I see it is that’s a profitable business. It’s not a $200,000 or a million dollar a year business, but it’s a profitable business that is you can count on 100 bucks a day. I see it as it’s basically passive income. Once you set up the infrastructure, once you set up your website, once you set up your store, once you set up a nurture campaign with your emails and all that stuff, it’s a ton of work and a ton of time that you’re not getting paid upfront. But then it’s built. Yeah, you’ve got to keep it up. You’ve got to create some new sequences. You’ve got to keep the social media going. You’ve got to do that. But when you’re rolling in whatever, $100 a day, even just 30 grand a year, $36,000 a year, whatever it is, that’s money that you’re making while you’re doing other stuff that makes money.

30:33 CJ: Right.

30:34 Ty: I see that, I see passive money as totally different. Making a dollar of passive money is better to me than making $10 of other money. I can go build a website for somebody for 10 grand, but I would rather make that 100 bucks a day. Honestly, I’d rather do both. I’d rather make that 100 bucks a day while I …

31:02 CJ: Sure.

31:02 Ty: That’s kind of the magic of-

31:05 CJ: Yeah. I think it’s sometimes hard for people to get their head around certain people’s results, Leah’s especially. But when you’re talking about that in this way, so say 36 grand a year. We’re calling it passive income because again, as Ty noted, most of the effort in something that’s e-Commerce is in the front end. Once you get the systems down, your funnels down, all that kind of stuff, it’s much, much easier to grow. But then you have the scale thing, which is going to be the first thing that Leah’s going to jump on. She’s going to say, “Okay. If that $36,000 was earned by what you did, then let’s throw that $36,000 at that system and scale it 36,000 times.”

31:46 Ty: Yeah. If it’s working really well and making $36,000, your ad budget is X, then make your ad budget XX.

31:54 CJ: 10X.

31:54 Ty: 10X it.

31:59 CJ: And that’s the beautiful part of this. And Ty, one of the things that I think people are now really beginning to understand is everything that The Savvy Musician, Leah, even myself over the past couple years have been saying, is now so much more readily understood and appreciated in light of the lockdowns and all of this sort of stuff, where suddenly, I don’t care if you’re the biggest artist in the world, or you’re playing acoustic at a corner bar, nobody is playing music right now.

32:33 Ty: Not in a venue.

32:35 CJ: No, bands are playing in their bedroom and recording separate parts. And everybody’s being entertained with this for now. But nobody, it doesn’t matter, I don’t care who you are. You could be-

32:48 Ty: It’s funny to me how new it seems to everybody. Like, “Wow, somebody’s playing in their bedroom and everybody can watch.” Dude, I was on Twitch three years ago. This has been going on for a long time.

32:59 CJ: Oh, yeah.

33:00 Ty: People live-streaming music. This is not a new thing at all.

33:03 CJ: Yeah. So again, you’ve got people like us who are in online marketing, we’ve been doing live type stuff. We’ve been hammering it out because we were building an online business. Now suddenly, everybody has an online business, so to speak. Even if they’re just doing these live, they’re just trying to stay relevant, just trying to stay current. Want to keep everybody, have them top of mind so that when the economy does start to come back, which we don’t know when that’s going to be. But the thing is, now you had better learn the lesson. You have to have an online component to your business. I forget how you said it, but it was such a quotable line a little while ago, Ty, that if you’re going to have a music business, it’s going to have to be online.

33:52 Ty: Yeah. I mean, if I’m going to make music for a living, this is the only path for me to do that, where it’s hard to say if it’s surefire, it’s going to be hard work. It’s not a silver bullet. I can’t just choose this path and then magically, my dreams come true. It’s going to be hard work. But I don’t know, it is the path of this current era, I would say, just having an online business, running my artistry like an e-Commerce business.

34:26 CJ: There’s another thing that you, myself and Leah, we all share in common, and a lot of the other students that I’ve encountered say we’re doing well, they all have the same thing. I often talk about them because I’ll say, “These particular students, if you gave them half the information that they’re taught in the Savvy Musician Academy, they would still succeed.” Just like you said, you were TOM 1.0.

34:49 Ty: That’s kind of what I did. I took half of one point, I did everything 100% until a certain point. Then I was like, “I love PR and I love radio,” and I got distracted. But yeah, I literally did take half of what she taught.

35:06 CJ: And that’s because it’s what a coach looks for, heart. Right? It’s not the biggest guy, necessarily. It’s not the fastest guy or the strongest guy. It’s the guy with heart. I’ve got a friend of mine who I do a podcast with, and he was 13 years in the Army’s Elite Delta Force and all this kind of stuff. What a grueling selection process these guys have got to go through in order to get in these tier one special forces units.

35:29 Ty: My brother’s in the middle of that right now. He was training to be a PJ, and he just jacked up his knee. And then he has two herniated disks, and he’s out.

35:41 CJ: Oh, man. So he was going through a selection?

35:45 Ty: Yep.

35:45 CJ: Yeah. I think my buddy missed his first one because of an ankle injury, I think the very first day. They let him come back and he got it. But anyway, whenever he gets asked, “What are they looking for?” All the guys, it doesn’t matter how long they’ve been in it, they’ll tell you. We still don’t know what they’re looking for, but it’s not what you think.

36:08 Ty: Yeah.

36:09 CJ: They’re always looking for the right guy. But I did tell him this. I said, “Well, I guarantee you this, though, Mack,” his name is Mack. I said, “The one thing they all share in common, heart.”

36:21 Ty: Oh, yeah.

36:22 CJ: You know what I mean? Because there might be another guy who has a skill set that you need, but if he’s completely self-defeated and doesn’t follow through and won’t push past, he’s not in, period. It doesn’t matter what the sport, or field, or career is, there has to be that heart. So we were talking offline beforehand, and you had asked me, you said if I had read The War of Art, which is a Steven Pressfield book, which believe it or not, I haven’t. And everybody and their grandmother has told me I needed to read it.

36:50 Ty: It’s so good.

36:51 CJ: I’ve got a feeling I’ll be down with everything that he’s saying. My son has read it. One of my sons has. But we were talking about something about how you defined that basic perspective because I think it is so, the idea itself is so incarnated in you. Won’t you describe that?

37:08 Ty: I think in this world, especially in the age of social media, it’s easy to compare ourselves to other people. Someone just joining TOM, just found out about The Online Musician, is looking at Leah and instantly comparing them to the teacher of the course and thinking, “Okay. I’m never going to get there,” or even just finding people who’ve been working the course for whatever. I’ve been working the principles for more than, I don’t know, almost four or five years, whatever. And they kind of compare and see I’m not there. It’s like a 15 year old looking at 30 year old and being like, “I’m not where that person is, so I could never be there.”

No, you’re going to have some more birthdays. You’re going to learn some things. And so what I’ve found is a lot of people will be like, “Well, Ty, I get that you had some success in this. You had some PR success. You had some business success in this. But not everyone can be their own designer. Not everyone can afford to hire a designer. Not everyone can afford this or that. Not everyone’s as talented or whatever.” And I’m not trying to be a jerk, but sometimes I have to say to those people, “I put 10,000 hours into design. That’s why I’m good at it. I’m not good at it because I’m talented at it per se, I’m good at it because I’m a … ” I don’t want to cuss, but it’s because I’m a stubborn SOB.

I think that’s what I love. Go read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. It’s not The Art of War. That’s a very famous book. He kind of intended to play on the words. It’s The War of Art. The whole thing is kind of a knife, almost a knife jab at creative people, where it’s like do what you’re supposed to do or you’re an idiot. I think he cusses in his book too. He’s the guy who wrote Legend of Bagger Vance. He wrote a lot of really popular screenplays. But that whole book, stop romanticizing entrepreneurship, and romanticizing talent and being an artist and all these things. Don’t romanticize it. Just be stubborn. Say, “I’m going to get this done.”

I’m going to make an album. That was for me, my first album was the thing. Leah helped push me to finish my first album. I had four other albums that were incomplete before that, four whole albums of stuff. I have a whole folk album. I have a whole … It’s one of the reasons why my first album is so good, it’s because I already wrote four albums before that. But I was an idiot and didn’t put them out. And I wasn’t stubborn enough. I had all the talent in the world. I’ve always been good at music. I had talent. I had the design skills before that. I had all these skills, but I wasn’t stubborn enough. And so I would challenge everyone to stop romanticizing this whole artistry thing and the whole entrepreneurship thing, and just be stubborn.

You’ve never built a website, but you’re going to build a website. And just be determined to build a website no matter what. If it takes you a week, if it takes you six months, be a stubborn SOB and make a freaking website, or whatever your hurdle is. Finish the album. For me, mine was finish an album and release it. That’s it. But there are obviously 60 or 100 to dos in between those points that I’ve got to knock out, but write them down. You know what you’ve got to do, just get a piece of paper out. Make a giant freaking to do list. Okay, that looks crazy. Put it in order now. Put them in priority order, whatever. Do the work. Stop being a wimp. I guess it’s getting into CJ’s around here, metal up.

40:58 CJ: I was going to say, dude, that is so metal motivation. Holy crap. Again, this is why I love Ty. And I saw this because when I look back on the relationship we had, even back in 2013, I could see the streak in him. There was a determination there. He was stubborn because I dealt with it on the other side with the owner. Do you know what I mean? Because the owner wanted more done without putting up any money, whereas Ty was like, “No, no, no, no, no. We’re not doing that.” And so Ty would be very, very insistent on the money. But that’s that stubbornness.

41:39 Ty: Yeah. It’s the whole everybody wants… When it comes to websites, and anyone who’s gone through the TOM course, it’s a big part of it is building your own website, building your own store, building your website and your store. You’re building two websites. That’s a lot for someone who hasn’t touched a website. But so for me, I’ve built websites for people my whole life. And it’s like everyone wants a BMW, everyone wants the best website in the world, but they want to spend zero dollars. It’s always like, “Okay. If you want to spend 500 bucks, you’re going to get a Volkswagen. All right? I’m going to build you the best Volkswagen you’ve ever had, but it’s still going to be a Volkswagen.”

42:17 CJ: Yeah. And this is again, and I love that fact that you touched on these things because it is truly a war of art because the creative personality is a sensitive one at times, fears judgment, doesn’t want to put itself out there. Can I have somebody else do my social media for me? I don’t want to necessarily be seen. They should just buy the music. It shouldn’t have to involve all of this.

42:44 Ty: Artists are affected by this more than anyone. And I mean, not to get spiritual on you. What do they say? They say, “Lucifer was king of all the angels,” not to get…

42:57 CJ: He was an art guy.

42:59 Ty: Yeah. He was the rock star dude, let’s just face it. Yeah. I think artists are particularly affected by this struggle. In Steven Pressfield’s book, he calls it resistance. Dude, go read this book, man. It’s just the resistance, he compares it almost to the alien in Aliens, where it doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care if you live or die. It’s like this alien creeping around and it just wants to get you. It sounds very bogey mannish, but it’s like resistance is like that, where it’s like if I sit down in my studio right here, and if I just show up and start doing the work, it gets done. But I get these thoughts in my head where it’s like, “You should whatever. You should just go play video games, or go watch all five seasons of Breaking Bad, or whatever.” And it just will do anything to get you to not just sit and just show up. For me, 90% of it is just showing up. And so the resistance is-

44:16 CJ: I think that’s why I think everybody keeps forwarding the book recommendation to me. In fact, one of my quotes I posted yesterday on all my social channels said, “Be ruthless with your own negativity, it’s out to destroy you.” So it’s the same kind of concept, is you’re being way too friendly with this resistance, way too friendly. And I think there’s a genius there, and of course, him being a creative person himself, to personify this resistance because you think it’s you. The reason why we entertain negativity, I tell people it’s because when it shows up at your door wanting entry, it looks like you.

44:53 Ty: Yeah.

44:53 CJ: You know what I mean? So I think, “Well, I am that person, so I am lazy. I want to watch the Breaking Bad. See, I suck. I’m not this. I’m not.” No, but the whole time, you have every single bit of capacity in you to stay in that studio, stay in front of that Mac, get that website knocked out, get that last song finalized. You have all the wherewithal in the world. It is the battle that you obviously have to win. Survivor song, right? Every day it’s ultimately, it’s you against you.

45:22 Ty: Yeah.

45:23 CJ: And who’s going to win that battle? And I just love, again, the simplicity of the stubbornness. And I think-

45:31 Ty: Be stubborn. Another thing he talks about in his book too, I’ve always … I’ve felt like I’ve felt this way always. He put it into really good words. But he just says, “Be stupid.” This is a good one for us too. What does he say? He doesn’t say be … He says, “Stay stupid,” where don’t try to think that you’re the smartest dude in the world. This is exactly what I did with The Online Musician course. I took Leah’s checklist and I’m like, “This is great.” I’m going to do a few little online ads, build up an email list, build the website, do this. And I’m supposed to just get a basic PR thing. And she didn’t even talk about radio.

But you know what, I’m a lot smarter, I’m going to get the best PR person ever. I’m going to pay a crazy amount of money. I kind of was smarty pants about it, where I just decided to be a smart boy. No regrets, I learned so much. I got my total education on the old school music model and how it works and how it’s still kind of operating, but it’s not working. I got my PhD in that after two albums of that. But he just says, “Stay stupid.” And so if I would’ve just stayed stupid and just done exactly what Leah said, my store, the stuff I’m doing this year on my store, I would’ve done three years ago.

47:07 CJ: Yeah, think of how far you’d be.

47:09 Ty: I’d be three years into building my business instead of really just kind of starting over.

47:15 CJ: That’s such a great point. There’s something that I teach on my motivational side, and I’ll mention it sometimes to the elite students. And that is the concept of representation versus substitution. Everybody remembers maybe being in school when you were a kid, and you had the substitute teacher come in when your regular teacher was off sick or whatever. Well, whenever we saw the substitute teacher as kids, we thought, “Goof off day.” We’re going to watch something and we’re going to do a handout or some other, not even do the handout. And the teacher’s not going to do anything. Who the heck is she or he? And so if your regular teacher is Mrs. Jones, then yeah, if Miss Smith comes in, and Mrs. Jones is not there, Miss Smith is the substitute, substitute can’t do anything. Why? Because the substitute has no authority. Why? Because the substitute doesn’t know anything about what we’re doing. She’s not a representative. She’s a substitute.

But if you get a representative, so let’s say for example, you’ve never seen Miss Smith, the substitute. Mrs. Jones has been there every day, but it just so happens that Miss Smith is Mrs. Jones’ roommate and protégé. And so she has been daily sharing everything that she does, and so Miss Smith knows everything that you’ve been taught. So here Miss Smith comes in, you realize Mrs. Jones isn’t there. Miss Smith writes her name on the board and you think, “Substitute, awesome,” until Miss Smith says, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen Mrs. Jones because I’ve been eating and drinking what she’s been teaching you for years now. We’re roommates, so we will continue with the curriculum as if Mrs. Jones herself was here.” Suddenly, it’s not goof off day because this is not a substitute anymore. This is a representative.

And the question is always if you want authority in your music business in this kind of marketplace, you have to represent what’s being taught and not substitute, period. It’s as simple as that. So for me, Ty, it’s such a, just from personal, I think everybody’s going to get that once they hear this interview. I know you talked to Leah on the podcast a long time ago. This one’s going to be so much better because it is Ty a few years later, a few kids later, and so much more awakened and illuminated and working things out.

49:35 Ty: Twice the kids.

49:37 CJ: So we’re going to be, I think everybody’s going to be really super excited to watch your continued journey because we’re still early on in this process, but I’m going to be honest with you, man. I have complete confidence in you. I don’t say that much, dude. I know you. I’ve watched you. I know your heart. But again, I think what it is, it’s that stubbornness. I know that’s your testimony, man. That’s who you are.

50:02 Ty: I’m going to get this done if it’s the last thing I do. It’s going good too, man. I’m in the process now, so I’ve totally rebuilt my website. For the first time, I actually just built my store in January. And I tore it down and rebuilt it from the ground up in Shopify just in the past couple months. And now I’m just smack dab in the middle of just writing a ton of emails for a nurture campaign. I’m doing a four-month nurture campaign, the biggest one I’ve ever done. But and honestly, man, I’ve hit a slow down, really half for good reasons, half for me just struggling. But half of it’s we just had our first baby boy. I’ve got five girls and one boy. And just enjoying family. But yeah, I’m slowly just kind of speeding the train back up to finish these emails, man. These emails are kicking my butt.

51:05 CJ: Well, why don’t you, first of all, because we never really discussed it, and I think it’s good that we didn’t so the people didn’t get too fixated on a genre, but tell everybody about your musical genre, and then how they can-

51:17 Ty: My music is all under my own name, so it’s just Ty Richards. I don’t have a fancy band name or anything like that. It’s just me, my name. And I call it, depends on the album, but the last album was psychedelic Nintendo rock. It’s almost punkish. Depending on the song, when I’m marketing a certain song, sometimes I’ll call it psychedelic Nintendo punk. The first album is always more poppy. I called it psychedelic dance-rock. It was a lot more poppy. It was the hit, it was definitely the hit record out of the two records. The second album is like my all straight to tape. It’s all directly to tape. It’s low fi on purpose and it’s kind of intended to kind of stir the pot a little bit. And I did. The other one was intended to be popular. I wanted it to be popular. This one, I kind of wanted it to be infamous. And it actually, that’s a whole other podcast, but it did become infamous.

52:15 CJ: Yes, it is.

52:16 Ty: It was an inverse of the other album. As popular as the first album was, the other one was very popular, and then kind of flipped around and became … It actually got me, I’m the only artist that I know that’s completely banned from Austin.

52:33 CJ: Now every artist is banned, but temporarily.

52:38 Ty: Yeah. Now we’re all banned. But yeah, before COVID-19, I was completely banned from every single [inaudible 00:52:45] in Austin. I thought I wasn’t for real either, and I actually tested it, and I’m verified banned. That’s a whole other story. We can talk about that later. That’s like an entire podcast on how to deal with … We can do a podcast on how to deal with being validated. And there’s another one. It’s how to deal with-

53:11 CJ: Negative press.

53:13 Ty: Mega insulted, mega, or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, I’m completely banned from Austin after this one song that I wrote. But I had a blast though. Honestly, I had a blast the whole time. I did what I set out to do with that album, which was stir the pot, and that’s exactly what happened.

53:32 CJ: If you call an album Welcome to Flat Earth, obviously you’re going to stir the pot.

53:36 Ty: And it worked.

53:39 CJ: Yeah. You’re highlighting the trends. You’re highlighting the things that are going on in social media. It’s the weird world in which we live. You’re at the apex of technology and innovation, yet at the same time, people have never been more into everything from ancient paganism and esoteric stuff to God knows what. It’s not homogenous anymore. It’s diverse and you’ve got weird political things and strange ideas. And it’s all being vomited on the internet and we’re making a parody of it all.

54:11 Ty: Yeah. I have a very satirical approach to my music. And so even with both albums, you can hear it. So first one’s poppy. The second one’s more punky. But at the same time, it’s all critiquing American culture and satirizing American culture. And some people don’t like that, I guess.

54:32 CJ: It’ll get you in hot water either way. So is it tyrichards.com? Is that?

54:38 Ty: Yeah, tyrichards.com.

54:40 CJ: And that’s Ty, T-Y, everybody. Ty Richards, not Richard. Ty, T-Y, Richards. It’ll be in the show notes, of course, because I think a lot of people are going to want to immediately jump off this podcast and say, “Okay. I’ve got to hear what this music is all about.”

54:56 Ty: Yeah. I’m a huge … I throw in the psychedelic because I’m just a huge fan of anything fuzz guitars. I just love fuzz guitars and I love old synthesizer. I’ve got this old synthesizer over here from the ’70s. And I love, I brought in kind of more Nintendo sounds too. I’m a huge fan of the nostalgic Nintendo vibes of the ’80s.

55:19 CJ: Well, as I noted too, one student, one elite student, who does kind of something a little bit similar, but his is more based on violin, but it’s all about the Nintendo. So he gets dressed up as characters and whatnot. I said, “Nostalgia’s not a bad thing to push.” You look at even the most popular shows on the streaming platforms, it’s still Friends, The Office, Seinfeld.

55:42 Ty: Stranger Things.

55:44 CJ: Yeah, it tends to be things that have a bit more…

55:47 Ty: Even new shows seem old. Do you know what I mean?

55:49 CJ: Yeah.

55:49 Ty: Stranger Things is a newer show, but it feels like the ’80s.

55:54 CJ: Yeah. It feels like a glorified ET meets something. You know what I mean? What is it? Was it Lean On Me? What was the one where the boys take the long bicycle trip? Stand By Me.

56:10 Ty: Yeah, Stand By Me. Yeah. My wife watches that all the time. You could go watch Stranger … I’ve watched Stranger Things 50 gazillion times because my wife is super obsessed with it. I like it too, but when she was pregnant, she would just watch it on repeat. And dude, I’ve listened to the music so much and seen the scenes so much that I see exactly what movies they took it from. You can see parts that are taken from Terminator, parts that are taken from ET, parts that are taken from Alien. There’s just different sounds. They took the production verbatim from a lot of these movies. So I’m doing that with my new record, where I’m taking actual Game Boy sounds, I’m taking a straight-up sample of the Game Boy sounds and putting them as the main tracks on a lot of the songs.

56:58 CJ: Wow.

56:59 Ty: But yeah, I think what you said, nostalgia’s good too. But I think the goal is to make something new with it too. I’d rather do that than just kind of rehash, or rehash an old thing.

57:10 CJ: Yeah. So tyrichards.com. And I knew this was going to be an interesting discussion, so I think it’s going to get a lot of value out of this, my friend. And again, I’m appreciative to have a front-row seat to what’s going on in all things Ty Richards. Go check out his website also because … And go to his store just because, again, I brag on this a lot with him, is he is a phenomenal graphic designer. And so all the stuff that you’re going to see when you get to his store and stuff, his posters and all the album work and the T-shirt designs, that’s all done by him, a lot of them by hand. So you’ll see that he is a phenomenal artist in a lot of ways. Again, puts him in a very advantageous position. But hey, Leah couldn’t design her way out of a box. So obviously, you don’t have to be a designer as well as a musician in order to-

58:04 Ty: Get a good team. Yeah, I would say there might be some musicians out there, some of you guys who are good at design, or web development, or whatever, but if you know you’re not going to be awesome at that, find a good team.

58:17 CJ: Right. Well, Ty, I know I speak for Leah when I say, I remember messaging her when you first came, showed up on the radar. The first thing I did was message her. I said, all I said was, “Ty’s back.” She’s like, “I know,” exclamation point.

58:32 Ty: Back on the wagon.

58:34 CJ: That’s right. But again, I know I speak for her when I say it’s so awesome to have you in elite now, where it gets even more intense.

58:46 Ty: It’s intense, man. It’s kicking my butt right now. I’m at that 80% mark where I’m just like, “Ahh.”

58:53 CJ: It’s like the last 80 miles from a two day road trip. Right?

58:58 Ty: Yep.

58:58 CJ: Oh, my goodness. All right. Well, listen man, we’ll have to definitely do this again. And I know people want to hear from you again. But again, man, thanks so much for taking the time, and again, appreciate the friendship.

59:09 Ty: Thanks for being a part of this, man. I think Leah was onto something four years ago. She’s onto it now. And I think it’s more relevant now than ever. I think it’s time for musicians to up their game, be more stubborn, do more epic stuff. Get it done.

59:29 CJ: Yeah. I told her. I said, “Girl, I’m not joking. And I’m not exaggerating.” I said, “What you’ve done with SMA in your own personal music business, and what you’ve done with the SMA, is the single most important thing to happen in the music industry since the blow delivered by Napster.”

59:47 Ty: Dude, man, I have to agree. And you and I have been around long enough to see both sides. We’ve seen the people that criticize Leah. And we’ve seen the people that really vouch for her. But the thing is, Leah is amazing in and of herself, just her and her music without SMA at all. And then you bring in SMA, and it’s this whole other amazing thing. But I think people are expecting it to be like, “Oh, so I paid for this course. Why am I not successful now?” It’s not a magic bullet. It depends on you, but just do the work. She’s outlined all the work that you’ve got to do. Now just do it. If you fail, it’s because you didn’t show up and do the work.

01:00:29 CJ: Exactly.

01:00:29 Ty: And I think people, I don’t know, and the people that have been around in the scene for a while with The Online Musician, just look at Leah all by herself with just her … She’s dropped how many? Four albums now.

01:00:43 CJ: Mm-hmm.

01:00:44 Ty: She’s four albums in. Her albums look amazing together. They sound amazing together. She’s got this whole business built around that, that even if she didn’t have the SMA business, it’s completely beyond sustaining itself and doing amazing. She’s just showing you how she did what she’s doing over here.

01:01:07 CJ: Now she’s doing it with Mythologie Candles.

01:01:09 Ty: Yeah, the candle thing, that’s a whole-

01:01:11 CJ: Blowing up.

01:01:13 Ty: That’s next level with just these two businesses that-

01:01:17 CJ: In fact, she’s so busy, I’m left to hosting this podcast. But that’s the thing, is that she does-

01:01:27 Ty: That’s a good problem to have.

01:01:27 CJ: That’s a good problem to have, right. Yeah. But that’s the thing. Dude, I would not spend my time with somebody who wasn’t legit. I would not spend my time with somebody who was full of crap. I would not spend my time. The only reason I’m working with Leah is, of course, we’re friends from a long time ago, but because I was there was she was facing bankruptcy. I knew her when she didn’t know anything about marketing. And I watched this happen, and she applies the principles. This is not gimmicks. This is not hacks. This is not secret software. This is not any of that. This is pure, this is the marketing that has been governing marketing long before the internet. It’s the same thing, same branding, same force of copywriting, same way you build any kind of business, which is why she has the confidence to move from her own music business to a music academy to candles, and God knows whatever else she’s going to get her little paws into next. You know what I mean?

01:02:20 Ty: Leah’s stubborn.

01:02:21 CJ: And that’s the thing, there you go. Very stubborn.

01:02:25 Ty: She set her mind to it, I’m going to get this done, and she gets it done.

01:02:27 CJ: Yep. That’s all there is to it, man. So anyway, again, I think we could probably have three or four episodes here. But again, awesome. So guys, listen. If you are a fan of this podcast, do me a favor and be sure and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. If they say, “Press stars,” give us five, four, I don’t care how many, whatever the max is. Just give it the like-age because this is a great way for people to discover the podcast themselves, share it on social media. We would appreciate that. If you have any questions or comments, you’re welcome to leave them in any said Facebook group that you might be a part of, whether the free mastermind, or The Online Musician, or even just go to our own Facebook page for the Savvy Musician Academy.

Keep in tune for what’s coming right now, which is TOM 3.0. Ty was on TOM 1.0. TOM 3.0, which is about to release, go to explodeyourfanbase.com. Listen for the outro here, and we’ll have more to say about that. Again, Ty, thanks again. Guys, we will see all of you soon. Take care.