If you’ve been around Boost My Star for any length of time, you should already know a couple things and this should come as no surprise to you.
The Tsunami of industry activity that I have been talking about for years, has officially made landfall. In case you haven’t heard, Joe Rogan has signed a deal with Spotify for over $100 Million Dollars!
Whether you love Joe, whether you hate him, or even if you have no idea who he is, that deal has huge implications for you as an actor.
You have to look at the big picture and what this means for the entertainment industry as a whole.
Joe Rogan is only the first of the industry professionals/online content creators to be directly bought out and in doing so, it set off a flurry of industry activity.
More on that in a bit.
First, let’s break down what this means for you and your acting career, and how you can capitalize on
this to make huge career moves with your acting career right now...
I interact with tons of actors on a daily basis and what I’ve seen has been a bit disappointing.
By and large, most of them don’t really understand why this is such a big deal. If you are feeling the same way, then pay close attention as we connect the dots.
See Joe Rogan is the epitome of how someone can build a career out of nothing.
He started as a UFC fighter, then went into comedy, hosted a few things (Fear Factor being one of them) and most of us now know him as the host of The Joe Rogan Experience which is by most metrics the #1 podcast.
Being the #1 podcast would be admirable at any time, but when you consider that today it means he gets more listeners (and viewers through the YouTube video version) than all of Prime Time combined, you can’t ignore that things have changed in the industry.
The lesson to be learned from Joe is that he leveraged one form of attention and industry credibility to open doors for himself in other places.
That’s a skill you need to learn, if you want to build an acting career in the new industry environment.
It’s where the opportunity is, and John Krasinski is another perfect example. Just days after news broke about the Spotify deal, John Krasinski signed a deal to sell his SGN YouTube show to CBS.
See, these deals can contain literally anything you want. He has a terrific agent and management team in place, which is important if you want to get the most out of things like this.
While the terms of the SGN sale are confidential, it wouldn’t surprise me if part of the deal included X amount of financing for John Krasinski’s future projects or even a guaranteed greenlight on a few of them.
As an actor, even on a much smaller scale, you can apply this kind of leverage with Casting Directors and advance your career quickly.
It’s not about having the rights to your content being acquired or getting a bunch of sponsored posts on Instagram.
It’s about generating enough buzz and interest in you and the talent you offer to be able to leverage that into something else, namely career opportunities.
CDs care just as much, if not more, about the attention you can bring to a project as they do about your level of talent.
Start from where you are.
You don’t have to launch a new podcast or start a web series to make things happen. You can and should leverage those down the road, but for now work with what you already have.
The time to do it is now. Don’t wait until you have everything ready and perfectly in place before you get started.
Both Joe Rogan and John Krasinski were just guys in a room with a microphone and a camera. What started with them will have a trickle down effect that will impact the rest of the industry.
I’ve talked to many actors about this since the news broke a few days ago and just about all of them responded with “sure Joe Rogan can do it because he has a huge audience and John Krasinski can do it because he’s already an A list actor...”
The only difference between you and them is the body of work they can point to.
Here’s why...
At the end of the day, humans are risk averse.
Since casting hasn’t yet been completely delegated to Artificial Intelligence (that’s a subject for another time) Casting Directors are humans too, so you have to put them at ease.
CDs, along with studio and network executives have access to teams of data scientists that assess the risk versus reward ratio of everything from the projects that get a greenlight to the impact of casting decisions on the probability of success for those projects.
This is why Instagrammers, YouTubers, and other content creators are being recruited by the mainstream industry in droves. The attention they bring with them, can have a huge effect on the whether the project is successful.
So, if you want to be on the right side of the risk versus reward calculations that happen during casting decisions. Here’s how I can help.
For an actor, your body of work follows the same path as the age old question about whether the chicken or the egg came first.
If you need a strong body of work to generate better and more career opportunities, then how are you supposed to build a strong body of work in the first place if you don’t already have one?
Most actors take the “slow and steady” approach and try to work their way up from working as an extra to “featured extra”, then one liners, etc.
That’s why most never achieve what they hoped to achieve. The shortcut is to do the opposite.
While you work on building out your body of work, make sure that your industry credibility is in good standing, since that’s what Casting Directors will look towards when your body of work is taking shape.
That’s how you can shave years off the time it would take to achieve your goals.
The road to success as an actor has its twists and turns and it almost never goes as planned. One thing you always have to be prepared to do is go with the flow and adapt to the changes in the industry.
Remember, I’m always only an email or a comment away and I’m always happy to help. I’ll do everything possible so I can...
See you at the top,
Scott