We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brendan Baar a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Brendan, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
Hey, my name is Brendan Baar or (24k). I started a music collective called Outer Limits back in 2021 with a friend who I had met through photography and videography. At this point, I had played music for years but had only worked on the creative portion (creating original work) from the photo visual and management roles.
Working with artists as a photographer/videographer, I was always inspired to create visuals for music that I really felt had a “commercial” feel to it. Stuff that you could hear on the radio or in movie scenes. As a videographer, it’s difficult for these opinions to be taken seriously by the artists or producers in my network because I had limited experience making anything of my own. I used this as a challenge and an opportunity to learn the technicalities behind music creation so my ideas were more easily digestible, and coming from a place of technical understanding rather than just an opinion.
Brandon taught me how to quickly and efficiently get the musical ideas that I had in my head into actual, working projects in FL Studio. After we collaborated on beats for several months, we decided to unite and create our own producer collective with the primary goal of bringing together a group of like-minded musicians who give each other feedback and collaborate on music projects. This idea would then be named “Outer Limits,” which was supposed to remind us that a few kids in their young twenties have limitless possibilities if we stick our head down and put the work in.
Over time, the collective grew to the point where we currently have around 15 active members who help in aspects ranging from business administration, artist management, producers, engineers, artists, and even a photo/video/graphic design team. I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent the better part of the last few years traveling and collaborating with talented musicians in Los Angeles and New York which shed light on a problem that we faced in our local scene; lack of collaboration. We pivoted and tried to focus our talents on bringing people to gather to help make the best art possible and try to compete with major record labels with our limited budget. Because of this goal, we were able to attract many local talented creatives all over the country.
We looked around and saw all of these immensely talented musicians and wanted to use our company as a way to help give them the shot that they deserve in front of bigger audiences, while also making great art in the process. So far, we have been able to help negotiate multiple distribution deals, get opportunities for music licensing, collaborate with well-established artists and producers, and prepare our talent for legitimate music deals.
One thing that we value above everything else is the quality of music that we work on. We pride ourselves on taking close attention to detail during all parts of the creative process in order to clearly articulate the artists vision and provide the most high quality experience for our fans.
In conclusion, we have spent the last few years trying to figure out how a bunch of up and coming creatives can come together and organize to make the best possible music and release it in a way that can help our artists get the attention that we believe they deserve. There are plenty of great musicians out there and we hope that the work we’re doing can help them gain some recognition.
Brendan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
In college I started taking photos of people for fun. Through that, I made the natural progression into video and began making videos that I thought were cool and posted them on Instagram. This lead to artists reaching out to me to shoot music videos and got my feet wet in the music world. I had already played guitar and other instruments since I was younger but had never made any original music. After working with an artist consistently to help with his visuals, I began to help manage his career which helped me gain more knowledge of the business side of things.
After doing the visual and the business side, I wanted to learn how to make music of my own and to try and tie all of those things together. I ended up learning how to record artists so I could get more people on my beats and try and get sessions more frequently since I didn’t have the budget to record at the studio a lot. Over time, I continued to do this and realized that my friends and I had a pretty good system of developing artists and helping them with pretty much anything that they needed creatively. We then started to run those processes through our two companies “Outer Limits” and “Archive Collective.”
Outer Limits represents the music side and Archive Collective represents the photo/video side of things. By sharing resources, we’ve been able to help with over 100 music releases to date and have a lot of stuff in the pipeline.
One common factor among most creators is that they lack a budget and usually a direction for their career. We’ve used our network and our experience to help artists out with this both on a per song basis as well as a long term career basis. When artists come to work with us, we try and make something that sounds radio friendly. We want to highlight the artists talents, but present it in a way that is easily digestible for the consumer, but also doesn’t sacrifice the artistic integrity of the song.
I saw a lot of artists struggle with dealing with creators who seemed to lack a genuine interest in the photos/videos that they were working on which often stunted the ability for the song to perform well. Being that most of our team has talent on the music and visual end, we try and help make sure that the materials released with the song are an extension of the art and help create the world or setting that the song embodies, rather than just picking the cheapest option and calling it a day.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
Our most effective strategy for growing our clientele is attention to detail throughout the entire process. When we’re working on something, we want to see it all of the way through. From the moment the artist walks into the door until a month after the song is released, we try and help the artists that we work with pay attention to all of the critical components of the art from songwriting, to mixing/mastering to content, all the way to content for promo after the release.
When we work on something, we hope to make significant impact and put quality music out into the world.
I think over time, artists see our passion for trying to make the best music possible and enjoy it. Once we begin working with artists, it is very rare for us to stop creating together. These artists also recommend us to the people and their network. The majority of our growth has came from word of mouth.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
One thing that I have found very difficult to manage when it comes to the team is trying to get people excited. When you’re boot strapping something that is supposed to provide long term success, it can often feel like you’re doing volunteer work that may have no end. As time goes on, its natural for people to become jaded of the process while balancing their personal life, work life, and everything else with their side hustle. Often times this leads to people feeling unmotivated.
My best solution for this is to take moments like these and zoom out. When we take a step back and look at how far we’ve come from the years prior, almost every time there has been significant growth in certain areas. This also forces us to analyze our actions and see what areas we need to improve on to get to our common, collective goal. Sometimes this leads to refocusing our efforts as a team that are better suited towards peoples strong suits. The important thing is that people are reminded by looking at their own actions that we have made forward progress and are that much closer to getting to our goals.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/24ktracks/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-baar/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQR5bbaA_GmVusqduKFD9Ew
- Other: Music I’ve worked on https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3y66iEgYsDLVt3xl7XPhMa?si=81093aca24204008 Outer Limits YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@outerlimitstv7120
Image Credits
Photographers: James McKenney Sam Rowan J’Lyn Smith Featured in the Photos Tay Da Prince Taylor Hall Armand 3inthevm Sam Boro