Rick Beato - In Conversation With...

without a shadow of doubt the biggest [Music] the biggest perk of this Spitfire Odyssey that I'm on by far is the people that I meet whether it be in Los Angeles in Reykjavik Tokyo Frankfurt it's amazing to meet and to make friends with this global sister and Brotherhood of people who have a passion for music and I guess in the case of today's video a passion for the business of music this YouTube channel is bringing me opportunities to meet people from a broader spectrum of the business not least I would say possibly the biggest music educator on the planet today he's helped me in coach me over the last few months in the kind of subtle craft and nuance of YouTube that the reason why the numbers disappeared from the titles was because of this guy the reason my thumbnails are improving is because of this guy so it's a great pleasure and honor that he agreed to come over to London to hang out with us at air studios and we did a couple of interviews he interviewed me and I interviewed him so ladies and gentlement great honor that I present to you Rick Beato your journeys been incredible because you you come from a conservative or education just talk us through that that journey so I have an undergraduate degree in classical bass and and then I did my masters in jazz guitar at knowing the conservatory in Boston and then I was a college professor for five or six years after they're really my entire 20s from the time I graduated from from college until I was 30 years old I was a college professor I taught you as studies I conducted big band on how to range to ear training theory all the different things many of the things that I teach on my channel and then a friend of mine on a whim asked me to play in a demo of his and I said I don't really play rock anymore and he's not just complaining this demo so I go playing a demo and couple weeks later he says the senior VP of Elektra Records heard our recording and thinks it's that we have hits I said we have hits you've read the songs we've and wanted to sign us to a development deal and that kind of started me off into doing rock music right okay and getting away from the teaching thing and teaching teaching jested teaching composition eventually signed a publishing deal in 91 and ended up taking a leave of absence from teaching in 1992 started a band that got signed that really never went anywhere me that mainly well one of the things was that there were all the labels were starting to consolidate Polyphemus Papa Universal it happens it started happening around 99 that was actually the beginning of the collapse of the music business because of the hierarchy went from bats to that that's right yeah and it really started in the mid 90s with the Telecommunications Act that President Clinton signed that you went from all these different many many you know 80 some odd media companies down to six and then all the playlists started getting you know programmed by a very few amount of people in the United States yeah I then went into music production around 99 and I started having a lot of success in that far more than I had as a performer and at that time I was in my 30s my youtube channel has really been an extension of that I was lucky enough to have some successful records some platinum records some gold records as producer but when I started it it happened because of an intern one of my interns came in one day and he loves watching YouTube he's in mid-20s he said you should start a YouTube channel there's no white haired guys on YouTube what are you talking about who's gonna watch my YouTube channels now do all your theory stuff do all your talk about production talked about all these kind of things so that's he taught me how to use a camera and the editing is very much like editing ProTools so that was that was actually the easy part for me was the learning how to edit edit video and I just started uploading and it took a long time to get anywhere I mean it took YouTube's very hard to break into yeah I did 340 videos in the first year in the first 12 months and it's a 5 or 6 a week I do in five or six a week yeah and then I broke into doing live streams things like that and I kept diversifying my content and it wasn't until I hit 200,000 subscribers till I did any thing with rock music or pop music it was all modern classical music music theory jazz improvisation ear training and then I went to I started this series called what makes this song great where I play multi-tracks and and and talk about recording process is talking about everything from how they mic things what the parts they were that they were playing and then my channel really grew up to a you know mid 700,000 subscribers now so when I noticed in one of my videos that I just hit hit the algorithm and were there any kind of bumps you know that you know I've had almost no I had this one Apple rant that got a couple million views this that's one way to monetize keeping the boxes I knew these would come in handy I just got fed up I had a hard drive that there I had a computer of my laptop that I edited all my video on the died and and I was just fed up with Apple stuff I hated the way iTunes worked yeah it was became unusable and I still had my in my main studio I had in 2009 g5 tower or Intel tower and I was running Pro Tools 10 and that had the old operating system with the old iTunes that was very usable and I just lost it one day and made that video but you know other than that I had hardly had any I've had almost for the channel my size I've had almost no viral videos I don't I don't make viral videos my videos are informational videos I think and but that genuinely surprised me about news refreshing about your channel is that I I'll often go this I could just see that you're not chasing views because that one about modes is no it's got not gonna get as many no Apple rent no no my I did a video on every mode of the major scale melodic minor scale harmonic minor scale harmonic major scale double harmonic major scale all the auxiliary scales augmented diminished skills everything I did one video on each of those and I wrote a piece for every single one of those okay that was only that only use those seven notes or eight notes it was the diminished octatonic scale so subscribe because it's like it's deep stuff I'm learning so much from well what's its it's uh I know those videos only get fifteen thousand maybe these days they get thirty thousand because that's it and when I do what makes this song great those things do well because I use popular songs that everyone knows and people like to see how things are put together I think it's really fascinating because it's fascinating for me I like to see how things are put together and I've been a producer for twenty five years and I still like to see how a big hit songs what the components are with them it's so interested in you still learning by bottle absolutely absolutely traces school day yeah so I'm gonna move on to the business in a sec but you've gotta have some serious motivation to be doing five or six videos a week is it is it the action of being a successful youtuber or is it is it is it just a drive to to educate I've learned apparently there's this thing that happens that there's a certain point you I've never been interested in teaching anyone anything there's a point and it's a natural Darwinian thing where you feel you just gotta offload all of your knowledge is it that is a combination of things that motivates you so I went from 1992 to 2016 where I didn't teach anyone anything yeah and I think I'm a natural teacher that that's that's where I feel the most comfortable I always could play well but I think teaching came more naturally I love taking lessons and learning and I love teaching people you know anytime van asked me a question is that there are no secrets and I'm a YouTube channel I say there are no secrets I give away any I tell people anything that they want to know I'll talk about talking anything from how much you make if you have a number one song - how many how much you make as a producer you know how points work percentage points on and on records or how they used to work they don't really work much anymore because nobody buys anything but all these things that I always wondered about I think most people wonder about are things I talk about what you talk about as well and your channel has so that that's kind of been the the driving force behind as far as having the motivation to do it I wake up every day I'm like let's do it I've got I have all you get really angry like you did or I get really angry what's kind of this comes from the same place but yeah yeah I'm a pretty high energy person for being almost 57 so I can vouch for that and I always say how I can outwork any any of these young young kids I relate to that business so your businesses you know you know you're a musician and you hugely successful as a producer and your your business has changed and and is it from well I know I'm not gonna play dumb because I have a youtube channel I know that you can even with your stats you're not going to make enough to feed a family of YouTube ad revenues so you've you've diversified I take it yeah so I have a store where I sell I have a book that I wrote thirty years ago I have courses on there I have merch yeah I sell coffee mugs that have mode formulas and triad formulas and things like that and I sell a lot of those that you know people that I sold millions of it so you know that's what my channel support is through that it there is ad revenue to say there's no ad revenues but every day my videos these days are getting D monetized I was mentioned yes to you last night that I had another one of my biggest videos I only have four videos that have over a million views and one of those videos was demonetized last night so this is the list Viki subjects right in which I was I was gonna get on to do you feel that the music industry misunderstands YouTube as a platform yes they misunderstand at least the educational part of it because they know it can generate money for them through video plays that they get paid for you know through people actually listening to the songs on YouTube they that that's a that's a pretty easy easy thing to deal with but what they don't know and they don't seem to care about is how people use music that they claim is theirs that's that's the thing that gets really tricky and so the video that I had demonetised last night hit a million views a few weeks ago and it's called audio file or audio fooled and I talked about people that took this test that was on NPR which is National Public Radio in the US they had they played six songs of all different genres and they played a 128k version 320 in a wav file yeah and they see if people could tell the difference now a hundred and fifty million people are so have taken the test and it's 50/50 which means that people are guessing 50-50 so anyone that ever said in the comments oh you don't know what you're talking about I can tell it I can tell any times and it's randomized it does it differently every time so it's a great send me your screenshot of your six out of six now there's been hundreds of people that said that guess how many I've gotten zero and that one person has ever gotten six out of six on it so that tells me that they can't tell the difference well in that video my old assistant Michelle is wearing headphones and there's a little bit of headphone bleed and there's a Katy Perry song that's playing that you can barely hear that the algorithm never picked up I never noticed it till I went and rewatched the video which I made a year ago last night and it is so faint they said in the copyright strike that some it was manually done so somebody went to my video oh here's a video with a million views that some music let's see if there's anything of ours in it right they found it and they D monetized it the the problem now is that you can't do anything about it at least seemingly you can although I think there that you can do things about it but Christian you said something to me yesterday about you won't even use music and this is that this is becoming a common thing in YouTube oh I won't even use music in my video and that's tip that's terrible well I think that what I'm really nervous about is is that I'm certainly aware that where YouTube is concerned we're talking about I believe six million creators six million channels assistants but yeah I mean you're talking about a few hundred really amazing channels and a lot of other stuff but from what I'm observing is music for picture music was being commissioned and recent picture is not happening on this platform that makes me very nervous because that's my profession it's writing music to picture that's one thing but what I'm also getting very aware of is people fear copyright strikes and D monetization will know anything else so what I'm hearing on the grapevine is people just don't want to use music and what I fear about this is we are creating a fertile grounds for AI yeah I don't feel a I because it's gonna put us out of work I fear fair AI because I don't want my children listening to pay I agree because it's it's just it's bollocks just the idea that people are avoiding the use of music in their videos is ridiculous you think about that you know if PewDiePie were to put my score under one of his videos and 16 million people were to sit and he credited me and I would see that as a great service absolutely specked how part of his ad revenue I would just see that as he celebrated my music he's promoted it thank you very much now it's down to me to work out what I can do with my online presence so I can monetize them yeah it's likely he's only used thirty Seconds the reason they're coming to me is they want to hear the three minutes this fear of new technology is gonna make the music industry shoot itself in the face again well YouTube is not making a stand that their default is to say they wash their hands of it unless the creator sorts it out what I've done is I've edited out the parts that I've gotten the copyright strikes for when they block the videos that's that's when I do it if it gets be monetized okay so what it doesn't gets to monetize so you just have to deal with that I mean I I don't like that but I don't have the resources nor the time to fight that yeah and that's for younger people to to do as far as I'm concerned we were talking about this earlier that eventually those people that you cut out that a lot of that's been happening in my videos weren't talking about hip music history yeah that's your history of rock music that's just emblematic of them being cut out of music history eventually them them completely claiming these parts where I'm praising them and talking about their historical significance and then me editing it out of the video so it doesn't so the video just goes to the next thing and ignores them well it's profound for me because my my grandfather was very famous incredibly famous in fact at the turn of the 20th century but he was a bit of a Luddite when it came to film so he didn't make any films he didn't wanna give his jokes away to the masses he wanted people to pay to come and see his shows and as a consequence no one's ever heard of him he didn't leave a legacy in that respect and I think it's very telling what you're speaking of this airbrushing out yeah I touched on this idea of being able to monetize you know what your music does for you I think there's an obsession with this idea and I think it's kind of a lazy motion all I have to do is write great music and then the money should come like an ambient income should just come flooding in do you have any thoughts or advice for younger people about how you have to consider entrepreneurialism as part of our our work you just have to look to hip-hop music because that's where all the people that nowadays have had all the great business ideas that that were musicians but had to look outside of music in order to actually make really you know the the big money that they've made whether it's dr. Dre or whoever you know it's uh you constantly need to be recreating yourself or thinking of new ideas to go to the marketplace with basically is is I think that's the that's a great lesson there how to be an entrepreneur is is key the things that our children will go to college for some of these you know oh go to school and learn coding well coding is all gonna be done by AI anyways in the future I mean so it so these things that that you think are gonna be careers in the future you never even know so so what your kids are planning on now they there may be no jobs for those but there will always be work for people that are good business people that they actually actually have great ideas and start companies thanks so much we just as a parting thought you know I would really urge people to have a go at YouTube's what try even if nothing else just to understand it more are there any you know key piece of advice anyone setting up you've given me so much advice over the last two days my thumbnails are gonna change see one of my friends said when I started my channel just to keep uploading yeah everyone else nothing changes nothing changes thank you so much welcome Gretchen appreciate it thanks so much Rick for coming all the way over to Blighty for your generosity and for sharing your experiences with this channel if any of you haven't checked out Rick and I'm sure most of you have a roaring massive convert his channel is linked below I would recommend subscribing so forthcoming videos we've touched on both Rick and myself our concerns about the attitudes towards YouTube with regards rorty's copyrights that kind of stuff and it's something I do want to investigate because I do repeating myself I know but I do have this concern that yet again possibly the music industry's suspicion to a new technology is going to leave it out in the cold I would really love to hear your thoughts ahead of a meeting that I'm gonna have with not only a fantastic successful composer but someone who also works at PRS and isn't the kind of real cutting edge of article 13 and these issues of rights and copyright and the royalties all of that kind of stuff so please if you have any questions for me to post him if you have any thoughts to share put them in the comments down below all in all to be continued so worth subscribing if you haven't done already doing that bail if you want to be notified the next time I put a film up and one of those always appreciated if you've liked this film see you next [Music]

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 39,573

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques, rick beato, beato

Id: wT0EXrycdNE

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019