While working on The Shaman and The Griot last year, it dawned on us that this was our 4th project together and that we had been recording music professionally for about 5 years. Crazy!
Very early on, we were applying the advice that every influencer, podcaster, and fellow artist gives on the internet: "Treat your music like a business!" We had our PROs and Publishing Admins all set up. We focused, kept our heads down, and worked on building our catalog.
With all that in mind, we decided it would be good to check in on these accounts to get an idea of how we were doing. We weren't expecting some crazy, life-changing amount, but we weren't ready to be let down like that. Between all our PROs, we had less than $30.00. We had less than $3.00 in our Publishing Admin account, and one other account was on hold due to "insufficient information."
Our spend, on the other hand, was a completely different story. We were tens of thousands of dollars in debt and still planning on adding to that with the recording costs of TSATG. smh.
This course of action was completely void of logic, and yet here we were. Then it hit us... we're really doing this out of pure love for the craft—for the love of music. We decided to make this a throughline carrying throughout the album, just like The Clipse did with This Is Culturally Inappropriate. And eventually, we decided it was going to be our entire brand.