When Ian Schwartzman first met Joe Budden just over a decade ago, he told the veteran rapper exactly what was on his mind. “I hated Joe’s music, and so our first meeting was me telling Joe that,” says the founder/president of management company/label To The Top, 38, who now co-runs Budden’s business empire as CEO of The Joe Budden Network. “But I was always interested in him, because I felt like he was like a hip-hop Howard Stern, and I wanted to build a media broadcast lane with him. He said, ‘Normally I would tell you to go f— yourself, but I like that your head’s in that place. What I’ve been doing isn’t working, so I’m willing to be open.’”
Thus began a business partnership that has lasted a decade and has grown from Schwartzman — who also manages DJ Premier, Remy Ma, producer Brady Watt and NFL player Zaire Franklin — starting as Budden’s music manager into a culture podcast empire; the two ultimately launched the Joe Budden Network and built their company into a $20 million per year business, Schwartzman told the New York Times last year. Along the way, Schwartzman and Budden have helped define, and then redefine, the podcast business. They started out by licensing a show called Everyday Struggle to Complex; then launching a podcast on SoundCloud before moving to an exclusive licensing deal with Spotify; then going direct to fans via Patreon, preaching a DIY attitude to their thousands of loyal listeners and viewers.
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For Schwartzman — who runs To The Top alongside his business partner Keeb, head of technology Tyler Dilks and PR guru Matt Conaway, and the To The Top record label in partnership with DJ Premier — building the Joe Budden Network has been about more than helping to pioneer and perfect the video-podcast-as-essential-viewing furor that has taken over media in recent years. It’s also about showing fellow creators that there’s a different path to success than simply signing away the rights to content in exchange for an upfront advance — a lesson he learned early on as manager for Brooklyn rapper Papoose, who turned to independent distribution after being cast out of the major label system and found it more lucrative than he expected.
“My model is very much long-term business over chasing checks; I’m not into a quick buck to get over the hump,” Schwartzman says. And he finds similarities in his approach to the podcast and media creator business in the music business, which has seen artists gain much more power and leverage by building huge audiences on their own in the streaming era. “I’m very much into finding ways to build recurring revenue and long-term money and building businesses,” he adds. “And I feel like the ecosystem has shifted towards my mentality as opposed to how it was 15 years ago.”
What did you learn working with Papoose?
He’s the one who opened the door for me. I used to call him 20 times a day, and finally, after calling him for a year, he was like, “All right, you can manage me.” Everything from there, I learned a lot about how your position in the industry as an artist directly correlates with what opportunities you get.
I couldn’t get him a major label deal because no one was interested. So I said, “Let’s go get a distribution deal.” Ingrooves Fontana handled both digital and physical, and he got to maintain ownership in the IP. We did an 80-20 deal — 80% went to Pap, 20% went to Ingrooves — and we sold, in two weeks, 20,000 copies. In the major label world, you’re getting dropped. In our world, with an 80-20 deal, we made like $300,000, and we were winners. And that opened my eyes to distribution.
When you met Joe Budden, were you trying to get into the podcast media business, or did you see that as something that was specifically great for Joe?
When I started managing him, he had done a few episodes of his podcast, but that’s not what I saw. I had seen him on Love and Hip-Hop. He had a short stint in 2004 on WBLS as a drive time radio host. And I’m like, ‘Damn, he’s so entertaining.’ In 2015, when I started with Joe, I wanted to find a client that I could get into broadcast and media with. I ended up doing Joe’s last album 10 years ago, and I got him to do his first independent distribution deal, with EMPIRE and Ghazi. We recouped the same day we released, and I got Joe to buy into this whole independent thing. And when we were on our U.S. tour to support that album, he looked at me, like, six shows in, and he’s like, “I’m done with this. I’m going with your plan. Let’s focus on media, TV and content.” And I was like, “Say no more.”
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Early on, you guys started it as a video podcast. Now, almost every podcast is video. Why did you guys want to do video from the beginning?
I was like, if we put it up on YouTube, how many more people are going to watch the video once a week? It’ll make the podcast bigger. And they were watching you on Everyday Struggle — why are we going to keep that from them? And I don’t want to be braggadocious, but I feel like when we did that, we changed podcasting forever.
The Spotify deal was audio-only, so we kept it on YouTube. Spotify flew us out to L.A., and we worked out a license deal with them. Probably the most valuable part of the deal was, I made them match, dollar for dollar, what they were going to pay us in marketing dollars that I had to approve. I wanted to feel Hollywood, so I needed them to spend money to not just promote it on Spotify, but to make this look like it’s something very special. We had billboards across the country, and we changed their business forever. We were getting a million listens an episode.
What did you learn from that experience with Spotify?
A big part of our negotiation was, we wanted to see data. What I learned was that people were listening. What I learned was that the big companies like Spotify and Apple make very little money on streaming because they have to give all their money to the labels. And what I realized was, when they have original audio, it offsets what they owe the labels. It flipped their deals. They were using us to negotiate their music deals, and they were also getting rich off of this medium of podcasting.
The rumors of IPO were coming down the pipe, and I was like, we don’t have equity in this. We had no ownership. We were getting paid pennies compared to what was happening inside the building. And what I learned from the data was our average listen time was over two hours per listener, and we’re talking about 800,000 people an episode. So when our deal was up, we started negotiating, and at this time, everyone’s coming after us. Amazon threw us an enormous offer. Spotify came. I was like, “Joe, let’s go D2C. Let’s let the fans tell us what we’re worth.” I reached out to Patreon CEO Jack Conte, and I was like, “I think we’re bigger than any deal they’re going to give us. I want to know what our support looks like.” But I told Jack, I’m not coming over there for just the upside of the deal terms. We want to own a piece of Patreon. And it took a lot of talking and negotiating, but he agreed to it.
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How difficult was it to get the paywall strategy correct?
We had a lot of meetings at Patreon before we launched. We asked them what worked for their most popular shows, and we also used our own discretion. We looked around, and we were like, “How do we build our own Netflix?” It was trial and error. We just added to it. We started with $5, $10 and $25 tiers a month, then we added the $50 tier, and this year we’re going to make some changes, too. Our goal is always, how do we make the experience for the viewer and listener better? They’ll be loyal to us forever if we really give a shit, and if we do, every opportunity we want will eventually come in front of us, and I think it’ll be multiples of what people are taking just to pay the bills. So that was our model.
How have you continued to expand it?
I would say 99.9% of it is the free funnel in quality content to a wider audience. And there’s a huge community around our show and around our network, so if you have something exclusive, like we have on Patreon, the free members aren’t going to want to feel left out of the conversation. We had partnerships that were helpful with Spotify, Revolt TV, Amazon, Love & Hip-Hop. Two months ago, we ran our first national TV campaign for prime time on CNN, ESPN, Fox, NBC, ABC. We have three different shows. But honestly, word of mouth is so valuable. It’s been our biggest marketing tool, and still is.
How do you feel this business compares with your previous experience in the music business?
Everyone’s chasing quick checks, as opposed to treating it like you’re building a business. Most people are signing to these big platforms, the Goliaths, because there’s no risk, and in that way, it’s very much reminiscent of the ‘90s and 2000s old-school record deals. But there is a small group of content creators, media brands and podcasters that are seeing the potential and the upside of controlling your IP and doing this yourself. And we’re doing everything we can to lay out a blueprint.
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Thousands of people listen to this podcast for two hours apiece. There’s a lot of power that comes with that. How are you dealing with that?
I think podcasting and media creation is the future of our universe, the way we communicate with each other. So I feel an enormous sense of responsibility to not only have an entertaining show, but also be thoughtful of the messaging we’re passing along about what’s important, and what to look out for. Back in the day, you couldn’t put out a record unless you had a label. Today, you can go online, create a YouTube presence, an Instagram presence, and make money directly off of passive ad revenue or direct sponsorship deals. And there’s a lot of power in that, and I think it’s going to lead to a revolution in what we see in our workforce.
There’s a revolution going on, and I see podcasting and media creation as being more popular than music in the future. Podcasting is modern-day television. It’s all melted into one, and the creator dictates the terms, not the network anymore. I think we’re going to start seeing teams like Joe and I that are as big as Disney. Those are our aspirations. We want to be a Goliath, but we want to do it independently, and we want to do it on our own. And I think we have a responsibility to deliver the information to the listeners and viewers on how they can build something themselves, and at least alert them to the options they have, because the future is bright.
What we are looked at [as] is a media network. What we really are is a data company that is taking the information and creating and curating around the facts. We’re not guessing anymore. The one thing that every creator has now is information. We want to become a household brand, but we want to be an institution for what the future of creators looks like, and that takes doing more than just making content.
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