Last week we put what felt like four days of work into two days. Not only had we not finished the songs prior to accepting to play, we also had to look at this opportunity as the first chance to establish our name. In All You Need to Know About The Music Business Donald Passman talks about establishing a team consisting of you – the artist, a personal manager, a business manager, producer, mixer and an agent. Kory is someone who has looked out for me and help establish who I am today and is consistently guiding me to help better my career, I couldn’t be more thankful and honored to call him my manger. Steve is the business head; his mind handles the things that regard the affect of the company in a way I wish I could understand. We have established he will take on the roll of business manager and producer/mixer.
Creating a brand was the next part. Passman and the authors Dan and Chip Heath from Made to Stick have helped lead me to understand what a successful brand looks like. Building off of what makes an idea sticky; simplicity – what hooks an audience, unexpectedness – what keeps people’s attention, a successful idea also needs to be concrete, credible, emotional, and you need to have a story. Concreteness – puts a picture in our head and help people understand and remember. Credibility helps people believe. Emotional aspects make people care and stories get people to act.
Kory helped put some of these concepts into perspective of myself. What’s stuck with me since being here is the nick-name everyone has been calling me – “tuna” whether its got the prefix “lil” or “yung” or just straight Tuna Boy, its what it is. And it’s so hilarious. I’m a white rapper from god-knows-where Washington who looks like a surfer punk from So-Cal who plays guitar and should probably be in a Ska-band writing songs about woman and weed. Yung Tuna sounds like he’d probably fall right in line. It’s an easy name to remember and everyone calls me it anyway. Yung Tuna is simple and it creates mental “hooks,” like the Heath brothers mention, to grab people’s attention. You don’t just hear Yung Tuna is about to play a show and not start thinking of all the possibilities of music that he’s going to be playing (or she!?). Being unexpected makes people pay attention. I’m coming down to a shared level of understanding by establishing first and foremost that, yes, I am a rapper, and a concrete idea like this helps coordinate people to a better understanding of what I do.
After establishing the name it was ironic what the next people that we met had to say and offer.
Prior to our performance Hannah and Cindy asked me what our name was and I said Yung Tuna, and they said it matched perfectly with my style and we hadn’t even performed yet. (Steve goes by Dusty but the stage name for both of us falls under Yung Tuna). After hearing our music the credit they gave us seemed unbelievable. They said that they could see us playing festivals, and coming from two street musicians who just have a genuine love for music that meant a lot.
But what was really uplifting was the advice three people with established careers had to offer us.
The following Thursday we met with Robbie Crawford who is an “insta-famous” instagram photographer sponsored by GoPro, and a good friend of Kory’s. We got to hang out with him and his wife and play some games; converse and he also showed Steve some tricks on mixing vinyls. When we played him the song in the video below he asked us to play it two additional times, and he enjoyed it, but this was the first time we realized our music was credible. Not only did he give us his opinion on what he liked he also instructed us on how to spread our product, and offered to promote it on his personal page.
Unbelievable. Blessed. Blessed, blessed, blessed.
The support kept coming, on Saturday, while we were in Long beach, Cathy, a hairstylist for Kory, was the mother of OC’s best female rapper. When she listened to our music she immediately gave Steve the number to a Venue owner she knew personally and said we would be able to play there for sure and wouldn’t need to be a warm up band, rather someone should open up for us. Turns out she grew up with a lot of artists who were big in Long Beach during the 70’s and sounded like she was either the agent of, or managed a few of them. Her credibility reassured us of our goals and aspirations.
When I picked up Kory’s friend Berrick, who is a pro surfer from South Africa from the airport, him and I started talking about what I was doing in LA and I told him about our music. He was interested, being that his primary listening was hip-hop, I played him the same song as the one below. His response was “I got nervous because when I hear someone is a rapper and has a goal and is pursuing it I get excited but a lot of people don’t have what it takes, when I heard your songs it sounded fresh the production was great and you were good and new, I believed it.”
By being emotional in our songs and creating a story we have made people care, and inspired people to act. Robbie wants to promote our song, Cathy gave us the resources to get in touch with venues and Berrick wanted us to make a song for one of his surfing videos. It is so rewarding to feel the support we’ve been getting from these amazing people and reinsures me that we are on the right path and making the right steps moving forward.