Castos Creator's Spotlight: Crimes Against Folk

Castos Creator's Spotlight: Crimes Against Folk
Audience
Castos Creator's Spotlight: Crimes Against Folk

Feb 04 2021 | 00:33:55

/
Episode 0 February 04, 2021 00:33:55

Hosted By

Stuart Barefoot

Show Notes

In this episode, Matt talks with Ed and Ashley from Crimes Against Folk. The wonderful episode has a ton of takeaways including finding and publishing your passion to the world, focusing on what’s really important first, and even finding sponsorship. In addition to a great conversation, today’s edition of Castos Creator’s Spotlight talks with Ed and Ashley about the evolution of their podcast because of 2020, and marathon livestreaming sessions. They also talk about the importance of discussing your happiness as a podcaster and balancing that with guest/listener tendencies.

If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to Castos.com/podcast. And as always, if you’re enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. If you have a quick moment in this busy holiday season, please leave us a review on iTunes. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! 

Today you’ll learn about:

  • Passion to fuel your podcast
  • Hindsight is/in 2020
  • Livestreaming and marathon podcast days
  • Patreon and extras
  • The format change of Crimes Against Folk
  • Sponsorship and monetization
    • Media Kits
    • Reaching out to brands
  • Staying in control of your podcast
  • What Ed and Ashley love about podcasting

Resources/Links:

Crimes Against Folk, website: https://crimesagainstfolk.com/

Crimes Against Folk, Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/crimesagainstfolk 

Matt’s conversation with Theresa Abram: https://castos.com/creator-spotlight-a-most-unusual-t-party/ 

Castos Academy: https://academy.castos.com/ 

Castos, website: Castos.com/

Castos, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/castos  

View Full Transcript

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 00:00:06 Planning in the year 2020 was a bit problematic to say the least castles podcast hosting is home to some very talented creators. And we had all the plans in the world to highlight them with a new original series cast. Those creators spotlight I'll save you the long story, but because of the logistics and reprioritization due to COVID, that initiative took a bit of a detour. We didn't ship nearly as many episodes as we wanted, like only one episode, but it was a great episode. And if you ever want to know what a handwriting detective does, check out the show notes for the link to my conversation with Teresa Abrams, a most unusual tea party podcast then emits the turbulence of 2020. I met today's guests, ed, and Ashley of crimes against folk. Our planning was a little rough around the edges. The content was fine, but it was lacking some thing that I couldn't put my finger on. Speaker 1 00:00:57 It could have been the crazy days of me trying to work from home with three children or the craziness. That again was the year 2020, but something great happened with these two creators. Since the day we recorded back in September, they transformed. I'm not trying to take away anything that they were doing or had accomplished in that moment. But today's conversation is a Testament to how you, as a creator, as a podcaster take on different forms of mastery, as you continue to produce content, everything you thought was right was wrong. The content you loved got tossed aside a few months later, like our original conversation. So when people ask me, how long should an episode be? What should my cover art have in it? When should I publish these episodes? It doesn't matter. What matters is that you create the content that you're deeply connected to publish it to the world and then take baby steps to building your tribe. Speaker 1 00:01:49 Today's going to be a fantastic episode if you're just starting out as a podcast, or if you've already uploaded a hundred episodes, look, I don't want to spoil the surprise, but you might even learn how to get sponsorship early on in your podcasting career. I was so happy. I was able to rerecord with ed and Ashley post 2020 and catch them when they really hit their podcasting stride. If you want to learn a bit more about this podcasting thing, go to academy.casos.com as Greg and I have refined our courses all about podcasting. It's free. It's at academy.casos.com. Let us know what you think or ping us@helloatcastles.com. If you want us to cover something important to you, okay, let's dive into two people who once toured the country, producing folk music for their fans to now sitting stations, Speaker 0 00:02:35 Creating a podcast. Speaker 1 00:02:38 Welcome back to the audience podcast, man. This has been an interesting episode to get out the door. I'm joined by Ashley and ed from crimes against folk F O L k.com crimes against folk.com. Folks. I hope you're still customers of cast dos. I think you are part of it. Speaker 2 00:03:02 I still use cast dos for the hosting it's I haven't found any real issues with it yet. You know, everybody kept saying, Hey, you know, a lot of our friends she's like, Hey, Libsyn, but it's like, well, they have kind of an anemic storage solution. So I'm not so thrilled about that. But Speaker 1 00:03:18 Halfway through 2020, uh, the team at castles, we were working on something called the creator series. And through just the, through the universe of chaos, that is COVID in 2020, a lot of complicated things happen. The, the creator series really didn't get it. It's like I had some fantastic conversations with some fantastic castles customers. And I plan on bringing that back, but maybe just in the form of the audience podcast, like a lot of things, we had some grand vision of having like another landing page, some more marketing materials. It's like, we over-thought it. Let's just get this thing out the door and have the great conversations with people who are creating podcasts in our portfolio of podcast customers. So I'm excited to have this conversation. And the great thing is hindsight being 2020. Can we say that on the year 20, 20 hindsight being 2029, it sounds like so cliche is when we, when we talked many months ago, I think it was probably back. Speaker 1 00:04:14 I want to say September-ish when we first talked, I was looking at your podcasts back then. I was looking at your live streams. Like you're doing all these things and in preparation for today's call, uh, when we circled back, I think last week or so I started looking at the websites are looking at everything and it's like, Whoa, there's another bad cliche hits. This is a new direction. This is, this is a new direction here for you for you also, what is going on now? Like where are you headed with crimes against folk? And is there a new premise, a new structure to how you approach this show? Yes and no. Speaker 3 00:04:50 Awesome with clarifying answer for you. Yeah. We decided it's ed and I are kind of famous for constantly making changes in our lives just because we're not afraid to improve ourselves or improve our situation or make a change. If we get excited about it, it's just not, we just kind of do that. And so we were talking about the podcast and we're like, well, we were, you know, we went into a direction of being mostly guest based and how are we enjoying that? And the answer was, we love it, but we also wanted to introduce some other stories into it as well. So we decided to kind of still like half the month, we're doing interviews with guests and awesome musicians that we know that we've met on the road. And then the other half of the month, we're telling stories of famous musicians that you might know. So we've already done one on Simon and Garfunkel. We've done one on Bob Dylan, we've done one on the ink spots and we've done one on Lilith fair. And we have plenty more of those coming up, but our interviews are not going away. They're still alive and well, Speaker 2 00:05:48 Yeah, it was kind of a logistical decision on one hand because it's, it was getting tough to really schedule guests out really tough to just Speaker 1 00:05:58 Kind of wrangle everybody together. So we tried to reduce that, but also take our podcasts and other direction to, I think, make it more interesting and more like the podcasts that we enjoy, you know, as a couple of examples, like reply all is one that we really love and Stephanie should know is you should know. Yeah. Like we want it to kind of align ourselves a little more with, with that kind of storytelling, because we already told stories. We want it to just kind of take a different Speaker 3 00:06:25 And also armchair expert because one of the things that we'd love is Dax Shepard does that he doesn't have like one kind of thing. Every time he has the experts and experts and he's got the armchair experts in his audience understands that there's two different kinds of podcasts going on that look very similar, but are also a little bit different. We liked that a lot. So we love bringing that into ours as well. Speaker 1 00:06:44 I think one of, I mean, one of many, but I think one of the things that I was really interested to talk to you about back back then, you know, from whatever feels like 80 years ago or whatever it was six months ago was that you guys were doing a lot, like you had, I was fascinated that, you know, you had the live stream, you had the YouTube channel, which is like, you know, you repurpose the live stream, live streaming is fresh on my mind. Cause we've been talking about it a lot on the audience podcast on this podcast, Facebook group, of course the podcast proper, like you're doing a lot technically structurally, is that still the same? I sort of remember seeing like three hour long podcasts from you. And then I was checking and I was like, boy, things are a little bit shorter these days. Speaker 1 00:07:25 What happens to those like all day events you were doing? They were, they were kind of marathon podcasting, uh, days. And they honestly, for us, they haven't gotten any shorter. They may have gotten a little longer because we've started a Patrion as well. And uh, that's at patrion.com/crimes against folk. So we're doing a lot of stuff before and after the show for our patrons. So we do a little kind of 30 minute concert. We moved that to the patron side so that we can still play music, but we're not kind of doing as much of the music. We're trying to focus more on the podcast and the stories and the work we need to do for that. But we also have a post show for kind of our higher paying patrons. So the time involved doesn't change a whole lot, but for Speaker 3 00:08:09 The audience it does, but not for the audience. Speaker 1 00:08:12 Yeah. Because that's what you were doing. And that's why I was, I think last time we talked to, we kind of pulled some synergy between video game streamers who are like, they're playing a game. They gotta be good at a game. They have to engage an audience. They have to have like, they have to build community and brand around that. All of us have very, I mean, when I talk about like, I feel like when you talk about professional content creators for the web, like I think these are folks that are real. I would call them professionals. People might laugh and say, well, this is video games. This is funny. Yeah. But you have to be good at the game is to do all this stuff. You have to engage people. And that wasn't so different from what you're doing, because you have to be good at playing music. Right. You have to be good too. And that's what I really like. You were doing music and then you were taking questions, many, many segments of the show. But if I'm hearing this right, this is still exists, but now you've just sort of compartmentalize that. Maybe there's a sharper plan around this whole thing. Speaker 3 00:09:04 I mean, we, we wanted to also direct a lot of our fans over to our Patrion page and really build the community there and also make our episodes a little bit shorter that we're offering to the public because they, you know, three hours might be a lot. I mean, we're exhausted at the end of it. So we can only imagine it's probably pretty similar on the listener side, but we didn't want to take anything away from our listeners as well. Because a lot of people really like that full form that we had. So like ed said, we just moved some of it over to the Patrion side. We're still, we're still doing it, but it just looks a little bit different. Speaker 1 00:09:38 And we're also doing a bunch of extra stuff on the patron side too. Like we're doing extra, we're telling extra stories from our touring history, we're doing kind of behind the scenes stuff. We moved our tips and tricks there. So people who do sign up can still learn things. Cause we really enjoy kind of sharing our knowledge, you know, with people. But we decided to kind of move it there just because, because of the extra effort involved, but we can also make it a little more focused as well. Speaker 3 00:10:04 And ed said, we wanted to focus more on the storytelling part of the, of things. So, but also, you know, we are musicians. So w we didn't want to get rid of that, but we want to be a PA you know, we wanted to focus more on the podcast side of it. So, Speaker 1 00:10:17 So here's what I'm really interested to dive into. We were talking pre-show about this. And I was like, excited to ask these questions. I didn't want to ask them pre-show cause I wanted to get the fresh answers out of you right now. What was that moment? What was that conversation like between the two of you to say, you know what? We are going to shorten this up. We are going to focus storytelling to the, the general public, and we'll put the rest of this stuff behind what I'll call the paywall. And I'll preface this by saying, man, I know what it's like to put in a ton of work into a podcast and be like, wait a minute, we're doing this for free. This is ridiculous. Like, did you hit that moment? You're like, Oh yeah. Like we gotta to make some money now. Like, what was that? Like? I think the format change in shortening the podcast length that came from, I think Ash, you had been, I think you found that article, you talked to a couple people and like, Oh, we need to, I think we need to change things up a little bit. Speaker 3 00:11:09 Well, and again, that's just something that ed and I constantly do. We're constantly checking in with each other, like, Hey, are you enjoying this? Hey, what are we liking about this? What are the high, the high points? What are the low points that we, we, we have a full, you know, 20 minute conversation after every single podcast where some of our ed, like ed said, our tire tier patrons are allowed in that conversation. We talk about every single show. Like what went well about that? What can we improve on? So I think it was just one of those natural progressions. Like, Hey, we've been doing this for a while. So how can we make it better? Speaker 1 00:11:43 One of the most popular questions that I get from customers is how long should a podcast be? And the answer is always like, it depends. And I hate saying it as like somebody who's in charge of helping folks out with a podcast. I'm sure. They're just like, Oh God, that, that answer again. But now that you're sort of seasoned podcasters, right? Like, I feel like you have, you're emitting podcast confidence to me now. Not that you weren't before, but you both are like at a different level now than, than just those short six months ago. Do you feel like, do you feel like you get it now because maybe you had those same questions back then? And you're like, man, there's no, there's no blueprint to this. It's just, you keep putting it out and you keep iterating. Is that fair? Speaker 2 00:12:27 Yeah. Ash. And I went back and forth quite a bit around the beginning. Like how long should this be? And, and we, we had, did have a lot of discussions about it. And I think we definitely decided, I think people wanted a bit of a shorter format, a shorter, more focused format. Speaker 1 00:12:44 Yeah. And, but we are not capable of a 30 minute podcasts. We, we like talking way too much, especially when we have a really interesting guests come on, you know, we just, which is all of our guests. We just want to ask them more and more questions and it becomes kind of this conversation. Like we almost feel like we're, you know, in a world where, and maybe you feel this way as well, Matt, but like in a world where we can't really get together as at all, or as much either whichever you're doing in this COVID world, when we have a guest on, it feels like we're having this social part of our lives that, that has been missing so long. And you almost don't want to let go of it. You want it to go on for longer and, and you're, you're catching up. Speaker 1 00:13:25 So that's why it becomes like we're sitting in front of, uh, you know, the fire in our living room, just having a conversation and, and people can listen in on it as well as the interview just kind of bleeds into each other that way, which I really enjoy. And this is something that I've been, um, dwelling on. It's not the right word, but something that we probably even talked about this back in September, because this isn't a feeling that hasn't escaped me by any stretch of the imagination, but this is what art creation is like. And I say this to people who are music artists far beyond anything that I could ever do. And it took me years as a podcaster to finally say, you know what? And generally my, my discussions around in podcasting is around business or tech or stuff like that. You know, very dry topics, the most people. Speaker 1 00:14:06 And it's like, but this is my art. So I've been doing it for eight years. I keep iterating on it. I keep thinking about it. Non-stop like, I always want to get better. And you do this stretch of podcasting for like six months doing this thing. And then you're like, I hated that and do it again. But then you have all these other people who are out there who are going, no, no, no, that was great. Like, we love that. Like, why are you changing? Is this a thing for artists, especially music artists would be like, I've been in it 24, seven, six months straight. I don't want to do this type of music anymore. This type of podcast Speaker 2 00:14:38 Iteration is, um, that's funny, you mentioned that word that's because that's kind of the, as ashes said, that's the core of what we've done as artists, since we started our duo. So many times we've sometimes seemingly out of nowhere, we've said, let's do this now. And then we go do it, you know, Speaker 3 00:15:00 Just, we just do it. Absolutely. I mean, we're, I think so I can definitely relate to that. I get very tired of doing the same thing over and over and over again. I think that can be hard on a listener because especially if you become a fan of a certain thing, you know, you're a fan of that thing and you want, you often want that person to do that thing forever. Even if the person doesn't want to do that thing forever. So I think it can be kind of hard to get your fan base, to switch over to that a little bit. And we do get that a lot, like button, you were making this kind of music and now you're making this kind of music. But what I've noticed is if you're confident in it and you know, ed and I went from being full-time touring artists to podcasters, and it did take a little bit to work for our fan base to be like, no, come listen to our show every week we promise you're going to like it. And they did. It took a little bit, or like, what do you mean you're not doing as much music in your show. You're just going to be talking. Okay. But they're in it now. So I think, yeah, as long as you, you move forward and in your hearts, in the right place, and you're confident about it and you love it, then your audience is going to respond to that. Speaker 2 00:16:04 Do you feel like you've found a, a shift either unintentionally or intentionally a shift in the audience from music, consumers? Like maybe somebody like me, who's going to listen to your type of music, to your podcasts where maybe now you're gathering much more musicians. People who are in the industry, people who know this stuff is just like you and they're tuning into you because, okay, you're just another, you're another expert now. And I really like what you have to say about music or is it a good mix in your audience? You know, I think it it's shifted slightly. Cause we, we see a few, couple of faces. That'll pop up in our, uh, when we do the live stream. And that's really kind of the only way we can really accurately judge what our audience makeup is at the time, like from a demographic standpoint, people we kind of know and people who chime in and we have noticed, I, I w I've noticed, I think a very slight shift that some people who pop in are people we may have known in our industry travels, you know, people who maybe Nashville folks, but other musicians, it's very slight. Speaker 2 00:17:10 But I think I've noticed that a little bit more, cause they're kind of coming back like, Oh, what are they talking about this time? I may want to listen to them this time or they'll post something like, Hey, you need to listen to this particular episode because you might learn something. So Speaker 3 00:17:25 I thought we might get more musicians tuning in, but actually it feels like we're getting more of our fan base or like our fans, more of our fans from, from like ed said from the touring days are popping in. I noticed more than the musicians that we meet. And I think a lot of that is because I think we're offering some really interesting insider stuff for musicians, but I think it's more interesting for people who aren't, because we're pulling this curtain down, right? Like there's so much that we have to do behind the scenes as musicians, not only for ourselves, but this, our guests and the stories we tell for other people that just aren't. We try to tell stories that aren't really told. And I think as, as a fan, as a music fan, it's really interesting to hear that side of things because that wasn't really, I mean, that's stuff was all hidden for a really long time, right? Like it, wasn't cool to show you at home in your home studio, you wanted this kind of mystique of, of what you are as a musician. And now people don't want that anymore. They want to see everything. They want to see what you're having for breakfast. They want to see, you know, you want to walk with your, your kids and, and what you're doing for your workout. So I think that's maybe why we're getting more of the music fans over the musicians, possibly Speaker 1 00:18:37 Lady Gaga really bring a golden Mike or did they spray paint that mic? And can we watch them spray painting that way? Speaker 3 00:18:43 And if it was really golden into the government pay for it, because I think the is yes to all of that. Speaker 1 00:18:56 And one thing I don't, I don't remember concretely from our last conversation, but I feel like the brand crimes against folk, especially the website and some of your cover imagery on Facebook has changed. So tell me, explain the brand again. I feel like we're, we're moving in a direction of, I don't want to say again, you're leveling up this. I feel like brand positioning where maybe back in September, we were kind of just like figuring things out. I don't mean that offensively Speaker 3 00:19:24 A huge compliment. Thank you. Speaker 2 00:19:26 Absolutely. We're still figuring stuff out in September, so, Speaker 3 00:19:30 And still are. And you know what, we're going to be figuring stuff out until the day we die. So, but no, the biggest change is we actually picked up a pretty cool sponsorship from E V electro voice. So they sent us these amazing microphones that you can see at night. We're both talking into called the R E 20 blacks. And I think that more than anything has really leveled up our game because we, when we, we speak into these microphones, it's like, Oh, we're, we are podcasters. Now these microphones are absolutely amazing. And the fact that we had a really cool company like V come on board and say, you know what we want to sponsor your podcast with these microphones was pretty exciting for us. So that also upped our game a little bit too. Speaker 2 00:20:15 Yeah. And also kind of just, you know, trying to establish more of a, you know, unique kind of logo design and all the stuff that we put on the podcast live stream and all of that, we're, I'm trying to kind of make sure that's all as standard as possible, but I think having Evie on board, uh, really helps I think, cause we, you know, we got a little bit of hardware support that I think, I think we really needed at the time, you know, cause it's, it's hard to get hardware sometimes right now. So, you know, that can really help another question that comes Speaker 1 00:20:48 Up in our day-to-day at Casos people do ask, how do I monetize a podcast? They see, you know, fill in the blank, most popular podcast on iTunes, whoever that might be. And they say, I also want to someday get a $30 million deal with Spotify. How did you come across, you know, getting this sponsorship? What was that overnight, but not so overnight success that got you to a point where it was like, Oh, did they knock on your door? Or did you knock on the door? Did you have some other formula to get their attention? Speaker 3 00:21:17 So kind of both, I'm actually, I'm a little bit of a whiz at getting endorsement deals. It's kind of a little bit of a thrill for me. And also I think it's really important when establishing your brand to, to collaborate with another brand. I'm a huge believer in collaboration overall. So I was actually looking for a new sound system for myself because I'm still doing a few outdoor solo shows here and there just to only outdoors. Cause I don't feel safe doing indoor shows and I live on the West coast. So I can do that here, but I'm very few and far between, but my, my PA was starting to tank. It was just screaming, not in feedback. I don't know what's going on with it, but it was like, wow, I really need a new sound system like immediately. So I started looking around to see who was doing endorsement deals with certain artists. Speaker 3 00:22:10 And I reached out to Electro-Voice because they have a very, very, very cool portable sound system. And they were interested in working with me and they actually approached me about the podcast. So it was a little bit of both. Like I reached out to them for just an overall endorsement thing. And they said, well, we, we noticed you have this crimes against full podcast. So can we talk about that a little bit? So that's kind of how it came into play. It was, yeah, it was a really cool relationship and we, we absolutely love them. Speaker 1 00:22:39 Monetization is always on top of our minds. We get a lot of questions about it, Craig, my other co-host and founder of Casos was just talking to a gentleman today that the podcast went out. As we're speaking today about ad tech and inserting dynamic ads in podcasting having ad inventory and having brands come and buy your airtime on your podcast, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, great for brands that have hundreds of thousands of downloads per month, they're celebrities already. So there's a thing that they can sell, et cetera. But for the rest of us, we have to go out and sell to brands. How important, or I guess, let me ask you this one question since you do get a thrill out of it, uh, Ashley, what is a, a skillset for somebody who's like, I've got a solid podcast that gets a thousand downloads a month. What's a thing that they can do to knock on someone's door or is there like a confidence boost that you would say like, yeah, it's okay to send a brand, an email and say, I get a thousand downloads a month for this niche community. You could never get this anywhere else. Is there a thing you mentally prepare for to do something like that? Speaker 3 00:23:43 Yeah. I mean, confidence is everything. And I'd say don't be afraid to reach out to brands if you think you're too small, you're not it's again, collaboration is key here in, in everybody's looking to do it. We're we're also in a world where brands can't really go out and market the way that they used to. So they need to pair with people who are doing things online. So my recommendation would be to get a media kit together if you're not sure what that is, go ahead and Google media kits, because I don't want to spend too much time on that, but it's just basically something that's going to have your bio, your listeners, your some photos and samples, all things that you would need that a company might want to see and then start messaging people, you know, message them on Facebook or on Instagram, or find their email on their website and just don't be afraid to reach out. Speaker 3 00:24:31 And don't be afraid to follow up 17 times because who are they going to respond to? They've got a bunch of emails in, are they going to respond to the, the person that emailed them once or the person that emailed them 17 times, they're going to message a person that's a squeaky wheel. And they also like that confidence and they're, Oh, they really, really want to work with us. So those are definitely the top quick things I can think of. But ed correct me if I'm wrong. I think we, I did an entire episode and crimes against Volk about our tips and tricks section didn't I earlier ones. Yep. Okay. So unfortunately I don't remember which episode number or title it is. Maybe we can figure that out for you later. Feel free to message us. But yeah, I give away a lot of tips and tricks in that episode on how to get endorsement deals, but definitely confidence definitely showcase who you are and then, and what, what kind of content you're creating? You know, I, I do have a few clients that I coach for their careers and we talk about endorsements a lot and I say, would you be comfortable if this photo or thing, whatever thing you're putting out to the world, would you be comfortable if rolling stone magazine retweeted that because if the answer is no, don't put it out. Speaker 1 00:25:44 Uh, well you're talking to, uh, an ex car salesperson. So I, you know, I know all about it and I'm a hundred percent there with you. So one of the things I don't know, I have a few friends and by a few, I mean two friends who are legitimate musicians, they've made a career out of it. Some of them have moved. One of them has moved to Nashville and she spends a lot of her time there. I don't know anything about the industry. What I do know is, or from what I hear is that becoming a music artist is very difficult and it's much like you pitching a brand, you're doing the same thing at a larger scale, trying to get a record label deal, I think is, might be the right phrase. I hear how hard it is and what that industry might be like. Do you feel like this podcast and where you're going is giving you the creator power back. Like you're, you're earning some leverage back in this space. Like you are more in control. It's the same level of difficulty maybe where you have to like work hard, like everything else that's, that's fruitful. But do you feel like you're getting more controlled Speaker 2 00:26:44 Back in this space because you can do it your way or am I just looking at things wrong? No, I think, you know, the funny thing is the industry I'd say in the past 10 years or so since the advent of social media, certainly the power has mainly shifted back to the artists. And especially in terms of marketing, marketing is so much easier to access now through things like Google AdWords and Facebook ads and whatever, you know, those things are so much easier for regular schmoes like us to access. So marketing's easier to access. Distribution is easier to access. That's been easier to access since CD baby in the nineties, you know? And so I think artists have all the tools they need now that the record labels mostly had maybe 20 years ago. So I think us shifting over to a podcast, nothing was really that different. Speaker 2 00:27:37 I mean, in terms of how much control and power we had. I mean, before, when we, when we were touring, you know, we had all the power, we did, we did everything. We produced all the music ourselves. Um, you know, Ashley booked all the shows. You know, we drove ourselves everywhere. We flew like everything was in our power and it still is, which is great. You know, like some of the methods may have changed a little bit or some of the platforms have changed a little bit that we use and things that we do. But we, as far as how much power we don't really, it hasn't really changed that much, Speaker 3 00:28:11 But you do hit a really good point. I mean, that was, I think that was more something that we felt in leaving Nashville back in 2014 or 15, whenever that was, we felt like we were, you know, we started with a word, which is, I don't even know, have we mentioned with our word yet? That's my fault. We forget we were musicians cause we're podcasters. No, but with the word is, is our music duo, which is w H I T H E R w a R D with our word. And we've made six albums since 2014. And when we creatives, because we wanted to take control of our careers, we didn't want to dabble in the industry side that we wanted to be the industry. We were tired of the, the, of the capital I industry that we had to deal with in Nashville on a day-to-day basis and the, the endless frustration and heartache that comes with it. Speaker 3 00:29:03 And we're like, you know what? Let's just eliminate all that and be independent musicians. And since we decided to do that, I've, I mean, I've seen more success in I've had, I've been in a lot of musical projects. I've seen more success in whether we're than anything I've ever done. And I moved toward the world doing all of it ourselves over 200 shows a year for five years without a home base. It was really, I mean, we look back at the last five years, basically right before the pandemic came and we can't even believe what we did and what we accomplished and it was all independently. So I, it was really cool to be like, you know what, we're going to do this podcast and we're going to do it in the way that we know works. We're going to do it. We're going to keep control and it's going to be great. And it has been, Speaker 2 00:29:44 You see this now as, I don't want to say the future of the brand and for, for the brand and the band, but do you see this as like, boy, I don't know. Like if, if the roads opened up again, would we go back on the road and do this all over again? Or is this like, no, this is the thing now, like we're here. This is just as our next chapter. Yeah. We definitely want to start playing again. I think we would. I think we're, we might change how we do it. Cause you know, we're, we're not in our twenties and early thirties anymore, you know, it's just like, it's just like, we can't do what we did even five years ago just for help us some for health reasons and other reasons, you know, but I think for, well, for me, the podcast has been really fun to do. Speaker 2 00:30:32 Cause it's, it's a bunch of different things that I haven't been able to do. Things like, you know, live kind of live broadcasting. Like that's kind of fun, even though it's only through OBS, it's really fun or, you know, actually distributing a podcast. Like when I found out how easy that was to do, I was like, flabbergasted. I was like, look at this, look at how easy it is. And um, I should've figured cause there's so many podcasts out there, but so there's a lot of things about the podcasts that are really fun. We get to learn stuff. I always enjoy learning things. I always enjoy teaching things to other people. So there's a lot of it that we do in the podcast. That's really fun and really rewarding for me. And I think getting back out and playing music, you know, I think we have to like, just find a way to do it, that won't just run us into the ground again. Speaker 3 00:31:30 And it's been really exciting for me to watch Ed's expertise and all of his tech knowledge come into play because he has to make so much work in order to make this podcast happen because we are co-hosting from different locations. So I'm, I'm in California and Ed's in Arizona and we're able to do it without the wifi lag through Ed's wizardry Speaker 2 00:31:56 Ed, if it weren't for you, right? The times I've heard that every day from me. Well folks who are listening, listen, it look how easy it is to become podcasts or stars. You can leave. One industry. All you have to do is tour the United States of America for five years straight, smashing the ground with your, with your musical instruments in five albums later. And you too can become a podcast star ed and Ashley. Thanks for, uh, redoing the show with me again. Where can folks find you to, uh, not only listen to the podcast, but hook onto your Patrion? So our main website is crimes against folk.com. You can go there and find all those subscribe links. Uh, you can, uh, listen to backup episodes. You can see all the notes and it's interesting to go there because we do have like a segment called show and tell. So we put photos up and tell the stories behind them. You can see the photos at the website, which is kind of a fun thing. And our Patrion is just patrion.com/crimes against folk. You can get a lot of bonus stuff there. We tell bonus stories, we share extra knowledge with our tips and tricks. We share a lot of behind the scenes stuff that we do, whether it's in producing music or learning about other stuff that we do for the podcast. So it's definitely worth it. Definitely worth it. Look Speaker 1 00:33:21 A little music to on only if it's still there. Nice everybody else. It's the audience podcast. You can find us at castles.com/audience. And if you haven't seen the email newsletter go out, uh, a new Academy, uh, this episode will go out in a couple of weeks, but academy.casto.com. You can learn how to become a better podcast, or we get a bunch of resources there as well. Thanks for listening. See you Speaker 0 00:33:47 In the next episode.

Other Episodes