207 – Building Relationships to Grow Your Music Career – with Ty Frankel of Shut Down Media

What if there were no limits on where you could take your music? What if you could work with some high-profile brands and build a six-figure business in the music industry in your early 20s? That’s what we’re going to be looking at in this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast with Shut Down Media CEO Ty Frankel. Podcast Highlights: 00:32 – How did Ty discover his passion for music? 02:29 – How did Ty get so good at project management? 03:16 – Tips for hiring or building a team 05:14 – What’s the main way Ty generates leads? 07:27 – Outreach faux pas 08:11 – What has Ty’s experience been with the music industry? 09:06 – Believing in yourself 09:41 – What is Ty looking to achieve next? 11:47 – What is Ty’s top tip for someone looking to create the life they want through music 16:54 – What’s the latest YouTube video Ty watched? 17:14 – Ty’s daily routine 18:03 – Checking your phone in the morning? 21:12 – What’s the greatest challenge Ty has overcome? 22:14 – What is Ty’s greatest victory? 23:21 – Ty’s recommended reads 25:02 – Final thoughts Transcription: David Andrew Wiebe: Today I'm chatting with founder and CEO of Shut Down PM, Ty Frankel. How are you today, Ty? Ty Frankel: Hey, Andrew. I’m great. How are you? Thanks for having me on. David Andrew Wiebe: I'm great. It's great to have you on the show. So, Shut Down PM is an LA-based music agency. You've created music for the likes of The Alvin Show, Hulu, Fortnight, Red Bull, NBA, NFL and others. You're only 22 years old. And you've already built a business that makes three quarters of a million annually. I've got lots of questions, my friend, but I'd love for you to share how did you discover your passion for music, and how did that lead to the work you do today? Ty Frankel: Yeah, Andrew. So, when I was five, I got into hip-hop music. I remember my dad bought me a CD player. I bought all these albums like Outkast, Stankonia, Lil’ Bow Wow, Eminem: Curtain Call. I might have been five or six. And ever since then, I just loved hip-hop. When I was 14, I was on these underground hip-hop forums on Yahoo Answers. I was on there for about a year. I was obsessed with underground hip-hop when I was 14 that lasted about a year. But someone started producing on there. Maybe one or two people started producing. They said they downloaded FL Studio, uploaded some of their beats. So, I was very interested and intrigued. And then, I downloaded it myself. And then since then it's just, you know, I discovered that it was my passion day one, right, when I opened the program up. Every day since then, up until when I started my company, I was just producing for most of the day. David Andrew Wiebe: Well, I have a similar story in that when I was 14, I guess, I started making websites. And that's what I ended up spending all day doing and all night, except for sitting in chat rooms, which I think I must have done for three hours a night and driven everyone crazy because we used modems back then not cable modems, dial up. Dial up internet. Those are fun days. Ty Frankel: Oh, that's cool. David Andrew Wiebe: So, I see you got some glowing reviews from clients on LinkedIn. They say one of your strong suits is project management. I got to tell you right now, that wasn't one of my strengths as a 22-year-old. And to this day, I've got a bit of an artistic brain so I can be somewhat scattered. Is this a natural ability of yours or something you've picked up along the way? Ty Frankel: You know, I've always been good at it. The past three, four years, I think I've gotten really, really great at it. Just reading books and just gaining experience. I mean, last year, my company did 900 songs, which is around 80 albums. So, just going through those 80 albums, each one is something different, developing systems and processes as well as knowing how team members need to be managed, you know, what they need from my end, what I need from their end. Just gaining that experience is, of course, helped me as a project manager. Absolutely. David Andrew Wiebe: I think hiring or building a team is one of those things that a lot of artists struggle with. It's like, what are my first steps? What if I make a mistake? Do you have any mindset tips to get over that? Ty Frankel: Oh, man, hiring is so awkward. It's unbelievably hard. David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah. Ty Frankel: Mindset tips? Of course, get hiring tests. The best tip I actually learned is make them do the actual job they're going to do as you are hiring. Like for example, if you're hiring someone to do lead generation for you, give them a little 30–45-minute test. That is basically exactly what they're going to do in the role and see how well they would do it. Just having that test. And then as well as like typing tests, you know, maybe critical thinking, personality. Making sure you have good intuition into like, okay, seeing how they communicate. If they have all these spelling and grammar errors, you don't want to hire them. In the job application. You could say, “Please title your job application this way.” or “Please reach out to me by name.” If applications come in, you know right away you're not going to spend your time thinking, is this person a good fit or not? If they don't follow the directions, you know, right away. Just having all these different barriers and testing criteria to actually finally hiring someone. But it's very hard. It's very lengthy. I sure learned a lot in the past couple years of hiring people. I had a lot of bad people. David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, being detail oriented. That's a big one, I think. If people can't follow instructions right off the bat, that can be a sign. My coach always told me, “I do. We do. You do.” So, that's kind of the training process. You show them how it's done. You do it together. And then, you confirm that they can do it themselves. And then, almost on virtual autopilot, they can do it. But what's the main way you're generating leads for your business? Ty Frankel: I would say it is 100% cold email. David Andrew Wiebe: So, do you find yourself sending thousands of emails every single day? Is that how that works? Or are you actually kind of targeting people that you have an existing relationship with? Well, I mean, you said cold, so I guess not. Ty Frankel: Well, cold email also means emailing our existing clients and trying to get more work done with them. That kind of goes in there. So, email. Email, I would say. Shut Down PM is actually one division of Shut Down Media. We actually expanded in the past like five or six months, really since corona. We do graphic design for the music industry. Right now, we're opening a new label called Uncivilized Music. So, we at Shut Down PM, we sell the music to these production music libraries. They're the ones that actually go place it with 2K and Fortnight and TV shows and all that. But with Uncivilized, for the first time, we're going to go out and sell the music ourselves. With Shut Down PM, we might have an email list of a hundred people. Or we might have an email list of 400 or 500. But with Uncivilized, we're going to get an email list of 20,000 people because we're going to sell the music ourselves. The type of emailing we do is very genuine. Now, obviously, people do that, but we don't send email blasts out. We send emails out. We have templates. And for the first email, we do research on the prospect to make sure we know exactly who they are, and if our service would help them. If not, we don't email them. But if it does, we make sure to make that known in the first sentence, compliment them whatever, okay, then we're in with them. They know that we're not playing around. We actually researched on them. And then after that, all the emails after that are templates but we change their variables in there. So, like their name, company name, and all that. In that way, you're being the most efficient you can be with as well on there, and they think it's a genuine email that you're just sending to them. So that's how we do it. It's worked really well to this point. David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah, I have seen that you guys are up to some other things right now. Kind of in the digital marketing realm. Like you say, graphic design. What you said about reach, I think that's spot on. I think that's what a lot of people don't do very well. Like, I get tons of emails. I can't speak for anybody else, but they're not addressed to me, they're not clear on the benefit. They just want me to cover their story. And they're not interested in in any kind of mutual win-win. So, it sounds like you're doing it the right way. Ty Frankel: Oh, thank you. I actually love seeing those emails because it just tells you how there's like no competition out there for real well-crafted cold emails. So, I love getting those emails. I just delete them right away. I just smile. There's always a smile on my face. David Andrew Wiebe: It's a really good point. Yeah, absolutely. So, many people say the music industry is a tough one to succeed in. What has your experience been like? What's your mindset going in? Ty Frankel: I think it's tough to break in to any industry. I think if you do all the right things, you know, whether that's working hard at first, working smart, of course. And then just creating relationships, being nice, easy to work with, providing value, and being able to market that value with a good ROI, making it worthwhile to actually go out there and market a service or product that you have, then I think you can succeed in any industry. So, I don't think the music industry is particularly harder to succeed in than any other industry. But I don't know. I've been in the music industry my whole life. So, I haven't really experienced anything else. David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah, I like your answer. I thought you might answer that way.