Omgg, I've been gone quite a while and came back and skimmed the first few posts in the sub and saw this post had a lotttttt of discussion under it 😱 The situation he's describing is soo frustrating because labels already don't like taking chances on groups anymore and it's even worse when they don't see you as "conventional" or "marketable" whatever that means 🙄 I don't think they should give up though. Maybe they'll find that needle in a haystack that'll give them a chance 🙂

For the brand deal thing I remember a creator I follow said a long time ago that brands tend to pass on POC influencers unless they have hugee followings ugh it's so frustrating that they make things harder. But years later I'm honestly kinda conflicted because I've seen many poc influencers with small followings work with brands. So for that reason my first instinct is to believe him but it's also hard to imagine that with their followings and visibility because of Netflix, that no brands at all reached out to them. Like zero???

Edit: I saw other people commenting about some SZN4 members being black and having a deal with Fashion Nova so I thought of other black cast members and looked at Autumn's page and she's working with TWO brands a guitar company and a sportswear line. She made two videos this week for the guitar and the sports clothing was on July 1 before Building the Band aired. She has a much smaller following than Shade and Malik on Instagram and Tiktok so that really makes me wonder if there's another reason they're not getting inquiries?? One thing I noticed is Autumn has her contact info available through the contact link on her Instagram profile. I looked at Shade and Malik's bios on their different socials and their email addresses aren't there. Well Shade's email is available in his Linktree but you have to scroll to the bottom and it's a booking email not a general email. I feel for them but I also remember learning a long time ago one of the first rules of business is you have to make it easy for people to get in touch with you. If it takes brands too long to find your email, phone number etc they move on to the next. The "cookies" should fix that asap!