Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald founded the independent publishing powerhouse Prescription Songs 14 years ago, and launched its affiliated label Amigo Records 7 years ago.

Sparkplug facilitator Ashlee Gibbs oversees day-to-day administration of the Prescription Songs/Amigo Records offices in Los Angeles and Nashville with a staff of 25, and an unconfirmed roster of an estimated 100 plus songwriters.

Gibbs is a former senior operations specialist for financial services companies working in Florida, and later in both Las Vegas and Los Angeles, before being approached by Gottwald to join the music publishing company and record label in 2017.

Prescription Songs has had a lengthy non-country relationship with Nashville. From 2013 to 2017, the publisher and Big Machine Music had a joint venture to co-publish songwriters there.

In 2016, Prescription Songs opened its own “Music City” office, helmed by Katie Mitzell Fagan, to invest in the city’s non-country scene. High-powered A&R executive Mitzell Fagan is also co-founder of The Other Nashville Society, an industry group for non-country professionals and artists.

While music publishing remains one of the more stable sides of the music business, like all other sectors it has been transformed in recent years by an ever-evolving global network of digital music platforms, and streaming services.

At the same time, as major labels consolidated, downsized, and then stripped away their marketing and distribution services, music publishers like Prescription Songs have greatly expanded in order to oversee intellectual property creation, and branding strategies while wholly committing to the long-term talent development of their songwriting rosters.

Among  Prescription Songs’ many, many triumphs have been: Doja Cat (“Say So”; Kim Petras (“Unholy” with Sam Smith); Lauren LaRue (Arizona Zervas’ “Roxanne”); KbeaZy (“That’s What I Want” for Lil Nas; Fridayy contributing to DJ Khaled’s “God Did” with Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, and John Legend; Emily Warren who has co-written a dozen Billboard Hot 100 entries including for such artists as  Meghan Trainor, Lizzo, James Blunt, the Chainsmokers, and Dua Lipa; LU KALA featured on Atlanta rapper Latto’s 2023 international pop-rap hit “Lottery”; and SNOW WIFE, named as one of Spotify’s Pop Rising Artists To Watch for 2024.

In recent months  Prescription Songs has signed: Singer/songwriter and pianist Greyson Chance; singer/songwriter/producer Heather Russell; songwriter Kola Adigun; rapper/singer Payday; songwriter Morgan Nagler; the songwriting and production team Play-N-Skillz–brothers Juan “Play” Salinas and Oscar “Skillz”; songwriter, producer, mixer and multi-instrumentalist Tony Esterly; producer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist Cooper Holzman; country artist/songwriter Scoot Teasley; and soul-inspired pop artist and songwriter Josie Dunne.

Among the recent Prescription Songs partnerships are the signings of Miami-based artist and songwriter Aloisio, and Miami-based songwriter, producer, and artist JayM through fellow Prescription songwriter DallasK; the signing of artist/songwriter bülow via Emily Warren’s publishing arm Under Warranty; and, in partnership with Kobalt Music Group, the signing of songwriter/artist/producer Anderson East.

Prescription Songs/Amigo Records is one of the great music publishing and label enterprises. It appears to be a great place to work.

I agree with you, yes.

After director of operations was added to your GM job title, Katie Mitzell Fagan, the company’s head of A&R Nashville, said, “Ashlee is the glue that holds us all together. The systems she has established to keep our company working smarter, not harder, at all times, have expedited our growth as a whole.”

So your role is more administrative than creative?

I am mainly here for the admin purpose, and also for any operations standpoint, and for entire plans too. When Luke approached me, the first thing that he said was, “I don’t want the staff micromanaged.” I was brought in with a certain skill, and I have increased my skills being here, and with having the team that we have.

Prescription, we are just young, and we will continue to grow and learn, and keep trying to be the best company that we can at all times.

What specifically do you bring to Prescription Songs/Amigo Records?

When I think of the company, I think of someone for the staff, right? Because the A&Rs are the creatives, and they are there for their writers. I was brought on just to be a support for the staff, and obviously to be a support for the writers with admin work. But, at the end of the day, I am here just to make sure that people know where to go if they need something. If it’s anything like that I am always here. I feel privileged that I get to do that. I wouldn’t be here for 7 years if I didn’t.

Your financial services background is a tremendous resource to bring to a music publishing company and label in that you can drill down and analyze where to allocate resources, and also determine where and when to cut back. Not many people in the music industry have your level of financial proficiency.

Creative people in the entertainment industries will often spend the bank to attain what they want; whereas someone from a financial background will say, “Hey, I think that’s a real great idea, but we need to work this out more or do it another way.”

You can provide an unmatched restraint at times whereas a creative might argue, “No, let’s roll the dice. Let’s go.”

I have never felt more seen and heard at a compay than I do here. That is obviously a testament to Luke and what he has built with his executives like Rhea (Head of A&R West Coast Rhea Pastricha), Katie, Bryan Trenis (Head of Finance), Megan (VP Creative Synch Megan Wood-Petersen), Sara (Senior VP Creative Synch Sara Walker), and Diana (senior VP of Business Affairs Diana Sanders). I speak with each of them all of the time. So to be seen and heard in that capacity is amazing at a company. I don’t know any other company that I’d feel that. Being seen and heard all of the time.

With his ongoing production demands Luke can’t obviously oversee the company day to day. It’s impressive, however, that many of your songwriters describe him as being readily available as a career adviser and as a creative sounding board when needed.

We have a staff meeting every two weeks, and he’s part of that. He is very much part of our staff. So when he’s intervening or talking to the A&Rs daily, they give him updates. He’s very intertwined with our staff, which is great. He’s maybe not in the office every day. He’s in the studio, but he’s great at just keeping up to date with the writers of the company, and A&R. They are comfortable going to him.

The close personal attention by Prescription Songs/Amigo Records staff to its writers, artists and producers is well known in the industry.

Working here has been, and is great, around the company that Luke built along with Rhea, Katie, and Sara, the founding people who have been here for a long time. Rhea has been here for 11 years. Katie has been here for 13 years. If you have that many people who have been here for a reason, Luke is obviously part of that; and, of course, the company and the executives that run it are phenomenal.

Since your arrival in 2017, the company’s staff has almost tripled.

We are now at 32 including myself.

How much staff are in the Los Angeles and Nashville offices?

In Nashville, we have 7 staff, all within the A&R department. We have one person who is not in the Los Angles or Nashville offices. That’s Bryan Trenis, our CFO. He’s in New York. He will come out to L.A. and Nashville to visit us and be here and there with our staff. We brought him in four years this November. It has been such a positive reinforcement to have him on the staff because he handles all royalty statements, and all of the things that come with being the CFO. He was the best addition and he’s such a great guy too.

You entered the music business from a decade-long career as senior operations specialist for financial services companies in Florida, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles.

They had wanted to bring on someone to be office manager and make sure the staff was happy. To make sure that the office was running smoothly. When Luke talked to me, he said, “You come from a different background than anyone else we have hired here.” He liked my sense of music. I liked punk and I was a little more gritty, and that is something that you don’t find every day in someone who works in corporate financial services.

As a self-proclaimed punk rock fan, you got to wear the T-shirt of the Orange County band the Descendants at work.

Yes, yes, all pretty wild things. But it’s fun here. We do little staff things all of the time with our company. Whether it’s a bowling night or going to a holiday party to Universal Studios Hollywood and doing all the rides together. That sounds cheesy but we have ribbons for our bowling tournament.

How did Luke know about you to hire you in 2017?

My husband Clint…

Of course. As chief engineer and technical advisor, Clint is notable for being “Luke’s right hand.” He’s another original Prescription Songs employee.

Clint is the longest running Prescription person at this point. He and Katie started within three months of each other. I have been with my husband for 11 years now, and we will be 8 years married in October (2024). I met him prior to working at Prescription. I knew Luke because of Clint working for him; from company events that you could bring your spouse or your partner.

A veteran mix engineer Chris Gibbs specializes in Dolby Atmos immersive sound that places and moves sounds in three dimensions–all around the listener. He mixes for artists on the Prescription Songs roster and others outside the company including mixing both the original version of “Say So” and the remix for Nicki Minaj. He has also notably mixed tracks on recordings by Doja Cat, Kim Petras, LU KALA, Latto (formerly known as Mulatto), Saweetie and Crosses, Bonnie McKee, Banjee Girls, and the Kid Laroi.

Clint is having a very good year.

Yes. He’s very dedicated. He still does work here. He’s still Luke’s right hand. He’s across everything here as one of the engineers, and then he works for himself at night. After our daughter goes to bed, he mixes. He’s not afraid to work all hours sometimes, but he still has time to put our daughter to bed every night. Work has not affected that which is great.

Didn’t your parents warn you not to marry a musician?

(Laughing) He’s better than the last guy I was with, so my mom is very happy.

How old is your daughter now?

She is four. She was born two weeks into COVID, and our lockdown at the company. I’ve got to say Prescription as a whole, particularily during COVID, I think really shined in that we kept our employees safe. We tried to make sure that everyone was taken care of. No one was laid off during that time. There was nothing that happened that we had to let anyone go. I think that we all figured out how to work successfully remote, and still today we are able to work remote at times. I’m not in the office every day, but I talk to the staff every day, all day.

You jumped from a career as senior operations specialist for financial services companies in Florida, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles where you had moved in 2013. That’s quite a jump to then to work in entertainment.

It was a lot of learning for me coming into the music industry, really learning it, and understanding it. But yes, it was a transition, and it was a cool transition really. Looking back, it was a really cool transition.

When Luke came to me, he said, “Do you want to do this?” I was like, “Well I have a job.”  I took a month to think about it because I was leaving a job, and it was secure. But I quit my job and started here in May of 2017.

You had worked in financial services for your entire working career.

I started at Kovack Securities, Inc. when I was 18 as a receptionist, and after two weeks they asked me to stay on to be support for their financial advisors. It is a security company. We did a lot with stocks, mutual funds, and bonds. I worked there for 6 years and then I moved back to Vegas, and figured out what I was doing.

You had a corporate mindset: An understanding of technical analysis, asset allocation, and advising on long-term and short-term purchases?

Yeah, I found that I liked the stock market, and those kinds of loans at financial services. It was interesting, and I was good at it. I was good at the admin work of it and working with financial advisors. Sometimes it could sound like it was a little intimidating with the financial advisors, especially the higher tier ones, but I enjoyed it for the time that that I did it.

You were born in Pennsauken, New Jersey that I know is home of the Double Nickel Brewing company which makes Maple syrup-bourbon-barrel aged brown ale among its line of beers.

(Laughing) I dId not know that. I moved from there years ago. I spent my teenage years in Las Vegas.

What work did your parents do?

Well my mom worked for Digital Computers (Digital Equipment Corporation) which turned into HP Computers (Hewlett-Packard or HP) for 35 years. My stepfather owned a car dealership. So we moved from New Jersey, and the Delaware area to Las Vegas for opportunities for my dad. My mom worked from home, So we were able to live in Las Vegas.

Digital Equipment Corporation, using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. At its peak in the late 1980s, DEC had $14 billion in sales and ranked among the most profitable companies in America. In 1998, the company was sold to Compaq in the largest merger up to that time in the computer industry. Compaq was then acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002.

What is it like being raised as a teenager in Las Vegas and having access to so much entertainment locally?

It’s fantastic because you get away with a lot of shenanigans. My teenage years were definitely filled with more shenanigans, and more places to go to than probably most. So going to a movie or going to the Strip for a concert, anything like that was cool. I would never trade my Vegas childhood or teenagehood for anything. I think that it made me who I am, and for me to be adventurous.

Like watching those recent CNN series ads for “Vegas Sin City” that proclaimed, “You don’t know something is illegal in Vegas until you do it.” Or the dated, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

Vegas has changed so much too. When I was living there, they didn’t have a hockey team (the Vegas Golden Knights) and they didn’t have the Raiders (the Las Vegas Raiders of the National Football League). They didn’t have all these fancy new things. So I still like the divier parts of Vegas. Punk bars. That’s the grittiness of Vegas, and it is what I still love.

You took special courses while you were working in Florida. Did you go to college?

I attempted to. I had a full-time job at 18, and I went to night classes for two years in Florida, and it just wasn’t working out for me.

Didn’t you later enroll at Los Angeles City College, the LACC, for the Extension Program?

Yeah, there was a brief time that I wanted to be a teacher. I said, “I’ll be back.”

You lived in Fort Lauderdale during the time that spring breakers came in hundreds of thousands, overwhelming the city with their sun-scathed beachside carousing.

Fort Lauderdale was an interesting time, and an interesting place. I never thought that I would live in Florida, but I did.

Let’s return to talking Prescription Songs/Amigo Records

Diana Sanders joined as senior VP of Business Affairs in 2022.

Throughout her extensive career, she has represented music artists and other entertainers, talent management firms, and industry executives in entertainment-related transactions as well as litigations involving copyrights, trademarks, and rights of privacy.

A graduate of Fordham University School of Law cum laude, and Saint John’s University, summa cum laude, Sanders began her legal career as an associate at Chadbourne & Parke in New York. She moved to Los Angeles in 2014, and has  worked at Thompson Coburn LLP, DLA Piper LLP and as partner at Russ August & Kabat LLP, and co-chair of its Music Practice Group.

Billboard recognized Sanders in its 2020 and 2022 “Women in Music Executives” lists, and in its 2021 and 2022 “Top Music Lawyers” lists. She was additionally honored by Variety magazine in 2021 as one of “Hollywood’s New Leaders.” She has been selected a “Super Lawyer Rising Star” by Los Angeles Magazine every year since 2018, and named by her peers to the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Best Lawyers in America, “Ones to Watch” lists.

Being a genuine legal superstar, Diana was quite a catch for the company.

Diana is definitely a superstar. She’s our business affairs, and she’s across all the deals and anything legal. I work in tandem with her and Bryan. We are costing together, and she’s doing all of the legal things. Our company is so much better with her, and I adore her personally. Her work ethic is great. She is always working and doing a great job.

What I love about her, and about our company, is that she’s not just about being a legal person in the office. Everyone, all of the A&Rs and anyone in the company, can go to her, and ask her questions about deals, and ask her about anything in general for publishing. It is outstanding to have her here.

Another in-house superstar is Jillian Rutstein overseeing synch licensing, social media platforms, and marketing at the companies. She started at the company in 2014 as receptionist and was Dir. Creative Synch & Digital before being promoted to Senior Dir., Digital Marketing & Creative Synch last year.

Jillian led the company’s digital marketing strategy for LU KALA’s “Pretty Girl Era.” Everything then changed for LU KALA with her self-empowerment anthem that was released in 2023. Produced by Dr. Luke. the track–with an estimated 19 million streams on Spotify—cemented her status as a major artist to reckon with and led to her performing at the 2023 Billboard Women in Music Awards, and even snagging a Times Square billboard.

So Jillian is obviously a very important part of the company.

Yes. I talk with Jillian multiple times a day because I work on the Amigo side as well, and she is doing a lot of the digital marketing on the label side. She’s been here 10 years in April. Her success, and her story are very cool. To see her here for 10 years, starting off as a receptionist, and then building her career here, that is quite a feat. She is such a great part of this company. She loves her staff, and the staff trusts her too.

Amigo Records launched in 2017, and has had several formidable successes, following the run of Luke’s Kemosabe Records, a joint venture Sony Music Entertainment, ended in 2016, when Sony distanced itself from Luke after he had signed  Kesha, Doja Cat, Becky G, Juicy J,  Lil Bibby, Yelle, and Bonnie McKee.

What was the initial rationale in having Amigo Records as an in-house label? Was it because it is problematic to develop a songwriter or a songwriter/producer, and then have them release music on outside labels? Yes, Prescription Songs would still have its publishing share from, but it’s far more profitable to retain the songwriter as an artist too.

From my understandings is that we had a lot of our publishing clients that wanted to have artist contracts, and they had songs that they wanted to have released, and it (Amigo) was a great venture for them to do that. It is really their own label.

Do many of your songwriters want to be artists as well or are they content being songwriters and, maybe, producers?

I think it’s a “follow your next step” (attitude). We don’t have a crazy huge roster. It’s probably a little split, and whatever they want to do we support. And that’s when they sit down with the A&Rs, and the most we can ask for is how supportive our A&Rs are.

With a label there’s a different system perimeter than being just a music publisher. Songwriters and songwriter artists have different priorities. With songwriters the emphasis is on placements, and synch opportunities, but add in an artist element, and there’s increased marketing development needed.

Right, exactly. Our writers are like, “I really want to put this out,” and we are like, “Cool, let’s do it.” And it’s been great. I have been on the Amigo side since 2018, and Jillian is full-time now for Amigo. working with SNOW WIFE, LU KALA, Joy Oladokun, lil aaron, Birksie, Ethel Cain, Lourdiz, Big Boss Vette, and others. They are all writers for Prescription as well. Jillian is working every day talking to artists directly. She has such a solid relationship with the artists which is obviously very important for us as a label too.

If you have jumped on any other social media platform in the past 18 months, SNOW WIFE’s addictive, rebellious breakout Amigo pop single “American Horror Show” would surely have grabbed your attention.

From her momentous 2023 debut EP “Queen Degenerate,” developed with her close collaborators Slush Puppy and Jason Hahs, “American Horror Show” has attained over 50 million streams, resulting in SNOW WIFE being named one of Spotify’s Pop Rising Artists To Watch for 2024.  

I also just love her follow-up singles “Wet Dream” and my song of this summer, “Pool.”

LU KALA and SNOW WIFE are both having their successes now. They have been signed for a year or two, but we have had other people signed too for awhile like Lourdiz who is featured on Nicki Minaj song “Cowgirl” on her latest album. Lourdiz was also on Saweetie’s “Back Seat” in 2021.

For a company so closely associated with pop and rap, Prescription has an impressive handful of less commercially inclined songwriters like Ethel Cain, Joy Oladokun, Vancouver Sleep Clinic, and Dave Thomas Junior.

Ethel Cain, the Southern Gothic, Americana dream pop singer, signed with the company four years ago.

Ethel was a great signing, and I loved her artist project (the concept album “Preacher’s Daughter” centered around the life of a Southern Baptist girl that dreamt of escaping her small town). I loved “American Teenager.” A phenomenal song. That song gives you many feelings when you listen to it.

Ethel grew up in a Southern Baptist, Tallahassee, Florida household, and has been deeply involved with her faith from a young age.

Ethel Cain is fantastic. She’s super talented, and I love all what she does. I really enjoy watching clips of her performing at festivals. Her fans are so incredibly engaged.

Joy Oladokun is amazing too.

Joy has had a lot of success with syncs as well as the singles that she has put out. She’s really had amazing success. Our synch department really is so great with Joy.

Among Joy Oladokun’s prominent syncs have been on “CSI: Vegas,” “This Is Us,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “And Just Like That,” and “Station 19,” and Showtime’s “The L Word: Generation Q.”

 I really took notice of her in 2023 with her album  “Proof of Life” which she co-produced with Mike Elizondo, Ian Fitchuk, and Dan Wilson. Two of the standouts tracks I recall being “Sweet Symphony” with Chris Stapleton, and “We’re All Gonna Die,” featuring Noah Kahan.

The first-generation daughter of Nigerian immigrants, and a proud queer Black person, Oladokun grew up in Arizona. She has appeared onstage at Bonnaroo, Hangout, Lollapalooza, the Newport Folk Festival and Ohana Festival, and on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” PBS’s “Austin City Limits,” and NPR Music’s “Tiny Desk (Home) Concert,” and other TV shows.

On Dec. 13th, 2022. Oladokun performed along with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C, Sam Smith and Cyndi Lauper at the Respect for Marriage Act signing ceremony hosted by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the South Lawn of the White House.

As well on the roster there’s the openly transgender German superstar singer Kim Petras.

Oh yes. To see Kim play at The Abbey in West Hollywood in 2018—6 years ago—   and then see her win a Grammy. It is the coolest experience seeing someone climb all the way to the top. From The Abbey, performing a small show, and having the best time performing with Sam Smith, and winning a Grammy, which is just unbelievable.

At the 65th Annual Grammy Awards held at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Feb. 5th, 2023, Petras and Smith won the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance award for “Unholy.” “Unholy” was released in September 2022 through EMI Records and Capitol Records as the second single from Smith’s 5th studio album “Gloria” (2023), and as a bonus track on Petras’s 2023 debut studio album “Feed the Beast.”

Kim and Sam performed a mind-blowing Grammy performance of their smash collaboration of “Unholy” while as right-wing influencers fumed that Sam had appeared onstage dressed like the devil.

While Prescription Songs/Amigo Records releases certainly do attain radio airplay, the company isn’t dependent on the medium for its successes.

No. We have our amazing film and TV department, and obviously we have A&R opportunities outside of that to introduce to the writers. So we definitely don’t have to depend on radio for success.

Attaining synch placements for The Super Bowl, Frito Lay, Sephora, Apple, and BMW, HBO’s “Generation,” and Netflix’s “Dark and Lucifer” are like hitting home runs.

Yes. Jillian, Siara Behar, and Megan work their tails off. Megan has been here over 10 years too as a part of the sync department.

The company is loaded with A&R personnel.

Yes, we do have a lot of A&R. So all of our writers have someone. They have support. We are A&R heavy, but I think that goes along with how creative our roster is and how much support that we can give.

How does Prescription find creative talent, and develop it so well? The traditional way was to discover acts performing in clubs. Much of the talent on your roster are songwriters and songwriters/producers and multi-instrumentalists, like Tony Esterly and Cooper Holzman.

(Prescription Songs A&R executive) Chris Martignago signed Tony Esterly, and Prescription Songs A&R executives Nick Guilmette. and Hannah Montgomery both signed Cooper Holzman. Those were relationships that they had. Our A&R really create relationships with these kinds of writers from the start before they really have anything.

I understand that if a Prescription A&R executive is interested in moving forward with a signing, they will usually put the writer in sessions with others in the company’s roster in order to evaluate their work ethic, skill set, and even personal character.

Sometimes a writer may have already had success, and the A&R have had relationships with them for awhile or someone with someone from their management or from their team.

Do your A&R reps try to first get support of their A&R peers, and other staff in a signing?

It’s been very collaborative. Sara and Rhea are always talking about things they want to bring in and then they chat with Luke.

Luke has a strong A&R background as a songwriter, producer and mixers. Was it his specific strategy to have that high level of A&R in the company?

I think so, but it is also Katie and Rhea wanting to make sure that the more we sign the more staff that we have to be able to support each writer fully. Each A&R has their own roster, and we don’t want to overwhelm them to the point that they can’t service each writer. So it’s very important I think to Luke, Katie and Rhea to have enough A&R support to really support those writers that are on each roster.

So Luke stays involved with the writers?

Luke is very much involved. The team is involved. As I said we have so many meetings including meetings that are across everything, and everybody takes part. At the end of the day we are a team, so everything is very fluid. It’s a great place to bring someone that you want to sign.

With the COVID-19 pandemic did the rate of signing slow down? You seem to be on a signing spree of late.

We were very much similar doing that during COVID. Obviously, I think that part of 2020 was definitely for everyone a kind of, “What’s happening?” and “Where are we going?” for everyone in general. But we did thrive in 2021 and 2022 and continue to now. So we were signing a good number of people in those years too. I think the PR side of it, maybe, we didn’t have Alex (Alexandra Greenberg of Falcon Publicity) onboard yet.

On many of the songs in your catalog there are 4 or 5 songwriters involved. They can work in home studios and are in the position to use stems in recording tracks. A decade ago they’d likely work at an outside recording studio or at a studio within a publisher’s office. L.A. is so spread out that during the COVID-19 period, it was natural for your writers and staff to work from home, and you didn’t have to shut down.

Our A&Rs learned to cope with working during COVID. I was on maternity leave for three months before returning, and everybody learned to Zoom really quickly.  Also we were changing culture completely, where people had to really migrate to video. I think that our staff did it (the change) beautifully, and they helped us make the transition too for that period of time.

The company also benefits from the songwriters on the roster bringing in other talent into the Prescription Songs family. I’m thinking of Miami-based artist and songwriter DallasK being pivotal in bringing in Aloisio (Christian Aloisio), and JayM (Juan Romero). Your roster connects with people who are working with others in the industry, and they bring in what impresses them to your A&R staff.

I’m impressed that DallasK’s relationship with Prescription Songs goes back almost a decade.

Yeah, and it’s a very positive one (relationship) too, and that’s probably why he brings us the talent that he does and to the A&Rs, Siara being one of DallasK’s A&R, they work very close together, and her working with JayM has been fantastic. DallasK has such a great track record. And I’ve worked with him personally across emails and stuff, and he’s just a lovely person. He’s a very positive guy to have on our roster for sure.

The nature of pop music today is collaborative with songwriters writing and producing with two or three others. If a Prescription Songs’ songwriter is impressed working with a developing songwriter or producer, they are going to tell your staff. As compared to going out to see someone perform in a club, you have songwriters in collaborative relationships.

I know 100%. And I know for Rhea, it is so important. A&R has multiple meetings a week together where they are talking. I think it’s a testament that all of our A&Rs they don’t always come in (to the office). They talk. They communicate with each other. If they have someone that they like, they will ask, “What do you think?” They are always working collaboratively. They are always talking about who is in the session, and who they are meeting in the sessions with their writers. It’s very collaborative, and very creative at the company for sure.

Los Angeles today is what New York City was in the 1950s, an unrivaled entertainment capital. There’s so much crossover with music, film and TV, gaming, and sports sectors that attracts people with different backgrounds and disciplines.

It is interesting learning a lot about this industry going backwards. As a consumer of music I know what I like. Coming here and learning the past of how thing things worked prior to the general music industry, I didn’t know a lot of this stuff. So it’s always cool to learn and understand it.

How often did you come out of your office prior to COVID when you heard music that appealed to you saying, “Hey, play that again. I want to hear that.”

It used to happen a lot. When we were in the office prior to COVID, Rhea’s office was right next door to mine. So you can only imagine the hits that Rhea was playing that I could hear though the wall. I would pop into her office, “Hey what is that? I love that.” And she was always like, “I love hearing that from you” because I’m not in A&R. I am a consumer. I don’t listen to the music as an A&R. I have different ears, Hearing stuff is amazing, especially hearing what it becomes like with an Emily Warren.

Your A&R teams deal with musics you’d previously wouldn’t be associated with in any way. It’s not music that comes naturally to you. Not with your background.

It’s funny but I was talking to Siara who has a grasp of the Latin world. I love regional Mexican music, and especially the group Grupo Firme (based in Tijuana, Baja California). I was telling her, and she asked, “Do you understand what they are saying.” I was like, “Actually no I don’t know what they are saying at all, but I can feel it. I can feel what they are saying.” She couldn’t believe it. She was shocked. “I didn’t know that you loved them.” I said, “Yeah I really love regional Mexican music.” That kind of music really resonates with me.

Regional Mexican is a big umbrella term as a music genre as so many sub-genres have become more mainstream in America. The sub-genres are mostly due to geography and different cultures. Regional Mexican acts like Grupo Firme, Los Angeles Azules, and Banda MS have performed at Coachella and other American festivals. Grupo Firme’s 32-date “La Última Peda Tour” that roughly translates to, “The Last Drunken Party” is  currently touring the U.S.

Despite Mexican culture being very rich, it has long been marginalized in American media coverage. Los Tigres del Norte, whom corrido scholars consider the Rolling Stones of norteño music, played on a Berkeley Folk Festival bill in California in 1970 alongside Big Brother & the Holding Company, Big Mama Thornton, Joy of Cooking, and Nick Gravenites.

Today there is just so much music to lock into.

It’s true, and that is what I love. I get to experience all of that through our sync and A&R departments. I see Emails about certain songs or get to see part of certain styles and I hear demos of these songs; or in a staff meeting hearing certain things, and it’s cool. It’s a cool job for them (A&R executives) to have but I like being an observer from the outside which is cool too.

Do you have agreements with other publishers around the world or do you license direct?

We are admined by Kobalt. (Kobalt Music Group).

Despite many of your songwriters and artists collaborating with international acts like Dua Lipa, Sam Smith and others, Prescription Songs/Amigo Records is mostly US-centric. You don’t have offices outside the U.S. Will that change?

You never know. A large portion of our writers are here in the United States but quite a few in Canada, the UK, Australia other territories. Spellz is from Nigeria. Shae Jacobs is from London, but his family is from Nigeria, and Bantu is from Zimbabwe. LU KALA is from Canada.

LU KALA (Lusamba Vanessa Kalala) born in Kinshasa (formerly named Léopoldville) the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been in the music industry for over a decade. She started off writing songs for other artists. A decade ago, she co-wrote “Dangerous” with DVSN (singer Daniel Daley and producer Nineteen85), and Stephen “Koz” Kozmeniuk that was recorded by Jennifer Hudson. She was featured on Atlanta rapper Latto’s 2023 international pop-rap hit “Lottery.” When Latto’s team heard a hook that LU KALA had written in 2022, they called her to sing the chorus.

The company prides itself on advancing the careers of women in the music industry, and roughly two-thirds of its employees are female.

However If I didn’t mention Luke’s controversial dispute with Kesha many would wonder why I didn’t.

Kesha released five albums, including her blockbuster 2010 debut “Animal,” and three EPs through Kemosabe. in 2014, she filed a lawsuit accusing Luke of sexual assault and emotional abuse and she sought to be released from her Kemosabe Record’s contract. Luke vehemently denied her accusations, and simultaneously sued for defamation and breach of contract.

The multiple lawsuits stretched over nearly a decade, but were settled out of court in June 2023.  Kesha’s deal with Kemosabe ended seven months after her delivery of “Gag Order,” her final contractually obligated album for Kemosabe Records.

Kesha wrote in her statement accompanying the settlement, “Only God knows what happened that night. As I always said, I cannot recount everything that happened. I am looking forward to closing the door on this chapter of my life and beginning a new one. I wish nothing but peace to all parties involved.”

In a fitting way to ring the recent Independence Day, Kesha dropped her new single “Joyride,” marking her first release as an indie artist since parting with Kemosabe Records.)

Other collaborators in support of Kesha spoke quite negatively about their experiences working with Luke Ethel Cain stated in her 2023 Rolling Stone interview that she would not have signed to the company had she been aware of Luke’s involvement.

Have you had similar responses from other Prescription Songs writers or staff?

No, honestly, we haven’t.

We live in a cancel culture era and often people don’t recover from such an accusation.

It’s all unfortunate. I can only say that my time with Luke, and at Prescription has been a positive experience.

Was it a difficult transition for you to pick up all the subtleties, and the intricacies of music publishing coming into Prescription?

No and yes. No because I pick up things, and I like to learn, and I ask a lot of questions. But the 7 years that I’ve spent in this company, and in the business, things just change so quickly too, and I feel like I learn something new every day which is something that I think is great at this company. I can ask Brian a question. I can ask Diana a question. I can ask Rhea and Katie creative questions so I can understand what it even means. So I feel I’ve increased my knowledge as times goes on.

Like finding out with some tracks, “Hold on people, these writing splits come to 120%. Something has to give.” I think you know what I am talking about.

Yeah, I look at a lot of that, and at a lot of different things on the admins side and getting to sit with sync and understanding that things have to equal 100%; and having the legal means to make sure that everything is connected with the PROs. All of that stuff. I didn’t know any of it prior to 6 or 7 years ago. But I love understanding it all, and I love being able to ask questions. And then I get to understand it, and then something changes.

As far as hip hop is concerned, have you looked into (singer, songwriter, and record producer) Fridayy who is on our roster that was featured on a DJ Khaled song?

Of course, Fridayy contributed to DJ Khaled’s five-time Grammy-nominated song “God Did” along with Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, and John Legend. He also guested on the megahit “Forever” by Lil Baby. Moneybagg (“Lies), Chris Brown (“No One Else”), and A Boogie wit da Hoodie (“Need You Around”)

He’s just an incredible A&R, and fantastic human being. I love Fridayy’s solo work too. Recently he put out a song “Without You” (Def Jam Recordings). about his father who passed away a few months ago while Friiday was on tour.

In a lengthy Instagram post, Fridayy reflected on the night he learned about his father’s death. “Got the call my Pop had passed right before I was bout hit the stage in Paris. I couldn’t tell you the feeling. I was just with him before I went on my headlining Europe tour, I was showing him the videos of the US Tour. He kept saying, ‘Wow all those ppl?? I’m proud of you son.’ I told him, ‘It’s all cause of what you put inside me.’”

Friidayy is also from Philadelphia which is very close to where I’m from in New Jersey. I love that East Coast component.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band popularized the Tom Waits’ song “Jersey Girl.”

A Jersey girl, I will forever be.

Larry LeBlanc is widely recognized as one of the leading music industry journalists in the world. Before joining CelebrityAccess in 2008 as senior editor, he was the Canadian bureau chief of Billboard from 1991-2007 and Canadian editor of Record World from 1970-80. He was also a co-founder of the late Canadian music trade, The Record.

He has been quoted on music industry issues in hundreds of publications including Time, Forbes, and the London Times. He is co-author of the book “Music From Far And Wide,” and a Lifetime Member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

He is the recipient of the 2013 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, recognizing individuals who have made an impact on the Canadian music industry.

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For decades the Canada Music Fund has been a critically important investment source for Canadian-owned music companies and artists. However, in recent years the explosive growth of the sector has greatly increased demands on the Fund beyond its capacity. Ahead of the announcement music organizations nationwide had joined forces to call for a permanent increase of the Canada Music Fund

While Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, became law on April 27th, 2023—updating Canada’s Broadcasting Act to ensure that Canadians will always be able to listen to music made by Canadians, specifically on digital service providers—Bill C-11 itself didn’t establish what regulations should be in place.

Following consultations with businesses and artists. the Online Streaming Act (formerly Bill C-11) was announced June 4^th, 2024 by the The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, an independent public authority in charge of regulating and supervising Canadian broadcasting and telecommunications.

The CRTC announced that it is mandating that online streaming services allocate 5% of their Canadian revenues to bolster the Canadian broadcasting system.

Specifically, the CRTC requires online streaming services making $25 million (Canadian) or more in annual contributions revenues and that are not affiliated with a Canadian broadcaster to contribute 5% of those revenues to be allocated as follows:”

• 2% to FACTOR and Musicaction; of which 60% is to be allocated to FACTOR and 40% to Musicaction;
• 1.5% to a new temporary fund supporting local news production by commercial radio stations outside of the designated markets;
• 0.5% to the Canadian Starmaker Fund and Fonds RadioStar; of which 60% is to be allocated to the Canadian Starmaker Fund and 40% to Fonds RadioStar
• 0.5% to the Community Radio Fund of Canada;
• 0.35% to direct expenditures targeting the development of Canadian and Indigenous content and/or a variety of selected funds;
•  0.15% to the Indigenous Music Office and a new fund to support Indigenous music.

These obligations will start in the 2024-2025 broadcast year and will provide an estimated $200 million (Canadian) annually  in new funding for Canada’s audio and audiovisual broadcasting sectors.

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Neill Dixon, president of Canadian Music Week, announced his retirement on Monday (June 3) at the opening of this year’s CMW in Toronto.

CMW will continue to be headquartered in Toronto with upcoming dates and details for the 2025 event to be announced shortly.

“It has been an incredible journey to see Canadian Music Week grow from a small gathering of music lovers to one of the most influential music festivals and conferences in the world,” said Dixon in a press release. “I am immensely proud of what we have accomplished and deeply grateful to everyone who has been part of this journey.”

CMW was launched in 1983 by David Farrell and his wife Patricia Dunn-Farrell–then co-publishers of the weekly Canadian music trade, The Record. It began as The Record Music Industry Conference and was modeled on competitor RPM Weekly’s “Three Days in March” conferences in the late ‘60s and ‘70s.

Dixon’s marketing company Chart Toppers was initially hired in 1983 to book speakers and organize panels for the annual event. Over the next few years, the convention morphed into Canadian Music Week, and Dixon became a co-partner a couple of years after it began.

Dixon had opened Chart Toppers in 1985 to handle a wide variety of functions in the music industry. Among Chart Toppers’ consulting assignments were working with the Juno Awards, Molson Breweries, Pepsi-Cola, the Ontario Lottery Corporation and others.

When Dixon took over CMW fully in 1993, he transformed the event in order to address the evolving global reach of the music industry.

What Dixon achieved with CMW amidst ongoing seismic disturbances in the music industry, which transformed the conference multiple times, was largely because of his ability to continually reset his annual event to tune into all sectors of the music, radio and technological sectors.

“As I step aside and retire, I am confident that CMW is in excellent hands with Loft Entertainment and Oak View Group,” continued Dixon in the press statement. “Their passion, vision, and resources will ensure that CMW continues to thrive and evolve. I look forward to seeing the festival reach new heights under their leadership.”

Randy Lennox, founder of Loft Entertainment Media, told CelebrityAccess that “Loft is proud to partner with Oak View to acquire Canadian Music Week. We’re standing on the shoulders of what Neill Dixon has built over decades, and we can’t wait to start our exciting expansion plans.”

For more than four decades, the highly focused Lennox has been a visionary figure within Canada’s music industry.

Lennox began his career with MCA Records of Canada in 1978, working in the mailroom—for free. He soon became a customer service representative. By 1981, he had been promoted to Ontario branch manager; and became senior VP/GM in 1993, handling the company’s day-to-day domestic business.

Next, as the CEO of Universal Music Canada from 1998 to 2015, Lennox played a pivotal role in launching the careers of The Weeknd, Shawn Mendes, Drake, Justin Bieber, and Alessia Cara. He then served as the president and CEO of Bell Media from 2015 to 2021, leading a team of 7,800 people and creating strategic partnerships with iHeart Media, HBO Max, Starz, Vice, and BNN Bloomberg. He also built Canada’s subscriber streaming service, Crave, and spearheaded Bell’s acquisition of Pinewood Studios and Just For Laughs.

As executive producer, Lennox has overseen film documentaries of  Canadians Robbie Robertson, David Foster, and Buffy Saint-Marie.

It was Lennox as executive producer who also oversaw the Canadian music industry’s 1996 four-CD box set, “Oh What A Feeling,” and its four-CD follow-up “Oh What A Feeling 2” in 2001. The two comprehensive retrospectives of Canadian music raised $9.2 million (Canadian) for Canadian charities, The Safehaven Project for Community Living, Starlight Foundation, and MusiCounts, the music education charity associated with CARAS and the Juno Awards.

Lennox was inducted into the Canadian Music and Broadcast Industry Hall of Fame in 2010. He was also the recipient of the 2017 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, which recognizes individuals who have made an impact on the Canadian music industry.

In 2023, Lennox founded Loft Entertainment Media, a music management and television content entertainment company that invests “in culture-defining talent and creative partners to tell their stories.”

“Our vision (for CMW) is to enhance the festival experience, creating new opportunities for artists and attendees alike while maintaining the core values that have made CMW a beloved event,” explained Lennox in the acquisition press release.

Oak View Group, founded by Tim Leiweke and Irving Azoff in 2015, is a leading developer of major new venues, either open or under development across four continents.

OVG is also the owner of Pollstar.

OVG opened its Canada division in 2022 with the $280 million (Canadian) renovation of  Hamilton’s 19,000-seat FirstOntario Centre (formerly Copps Coliseum) as its first major effort in the country.

Led by OVG and the Hamilton Urban Precinct Entertainment Group, the FirstOntario Centre upgrade will see the city-owned facility stripped to its core over the next 13 months while adding premium seating, improved acoustics and artist lounges. The focus will be on heightened technology and sustainable operations.

“Oak View Group is delighted to expand our investment in the Canadian market and partner with Loft Entertainment in acquiring Canadian Music Week,” said Oak View Group’s Tom Pistore. “This acquisition, along with our Hamilton Arena Project, aligns perfectly with our mission to elevate live entertainment experiences across the globe.”

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A commanding executive gifted with a peerless combination of business savvy and steadying grace, Cecconi was a true powerhouse of the Canadian music industry, and one of its chief architects with nearly five decades of service.

As she said herself at an award ceremony, “You’re looking at someone who rips through business contracts like a Harlequin Romance novel.”

She survived cancer twice, but in 2022 she was diagnosed with PSP (Progressive Supranuclear Palsy) which turned out to be a battle too great. Never one for self-pity, according to close friends, she met her diagnoses, and eventual fate with courage and humor.

“A profoundly sad and heartbreaking day,” says Geddy Lee, late of Rush. “We’ve lost a remarkable person, a beloved friend, and one of the most brilliant, sassiest people the music industry has ever seen. Irreplaceable and thoroughly unique. We were blessed to have her working behind the scenes on behalf of Rush for almost 50 years.“

Besides her lengthy tenure as Vice President of SRO Management Inc., and its recording label arm Anthem Entertainment Group for those decades Cecconi served on the board of directors of several industry organizations including The Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA) for 18 years; with The Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent On Recordings (FACTOR) for 18 years including as Chair and Treasurer); at the Independent Digital Licensing Agency (IDLA); and at the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency (CMRRA).

In the mid-80s, she also served on the board of the U.S.-based Professional Association of Licensed Music Merchandisers.

She received the Brian Chater Pioneers Award from the Music Managers Forum in 2015 for her significant contributions to the Canadian music industry.

Cecconi was also honored in 2020 with the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award which recognizes individuals whose work has significantly impacted the growth and development of the Canadian music industry.

As a forceful businesswoman, Cecconi was renowned for her tireless advocacy for creators’ rights. She became a powerful force who started out on the ground floor of the music biz, booking bands in the high school in her hometown of South Porcupine in Northern Ontario.

Having served as VP of SRO Management, and the independent record label Anthem Entertainment Group for decades. Cecconi involved herself in every aspect of the shared companies, including music publishing, management, booking, recording, merchandising, video production, A&R, master licensing, and legal issues while at the same time attaining extensive international expertise.

Significantly contributing to the Rush empire that moved more than 40 million albums, she fought to bring SCTV comedians Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as Bob and Doug McKenzie into the SRO/Anthem fold. Propelled by the Top 20 hit “Take Off,” featuring Geddy Lee, the duo’s album “The Great White became a cultural phenomenon, selling almost one million copies in the U.S., and topping 350,000 units in Canada.

A Juno Award, a Grammy nomination, and a 1983 Canadian comedy film “Strange Brew” came from the project.

“My proudest moment,” Cecconi said. “I told Ray, ‘It’ll cost us $8,000. If it sells nothing…we can afford the laugh.’”

Cecconi also played a pivotal role in the careers of SRO/Anthem co-founder Ray Danniels’ long list of other clients including: Max Webster Ian Thomas, Gowan, Matthew Good, Coney Hatch, Extreme, Big Wreck, Queensryche, Van Halen, Molly Johnson, Brody Dalle, the Tea Party, Steven Page, and B.B. Gabor among them.

Alongside Danniels, Cecconi elevated their two companies to an abundant creative culture and, in particular, helped build an economic infrastructure to support and connect musical creativity and the music industry.

Danniels explained Cecconi’s assets in a 2015 “In The Hot Seat” profile. “You have people coming through the door every day with projects for Rush. Pegi is the first filter. They have to get past Pegi, unless they know one of us, before it gets to us. She’s got a pretty good sense of what is probable or possible and what is a waste of time.”

Along the way, Cecconi never lost sight of what her focus was, and what she wanted the organization to do. It was almost like a teacher at the head of a class if you will.

“I wanted everyone to win and make money,” Cecconi stated in a rare interview. ““I could do anything I wanted, unless it failed. I didn’t fail.”

She further explained in her acceptance speech for the 2020 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, “You see, when I was coming up there was no “Women in Music”, and in fact that suited me just fine…because I wanted to be where the deals were being made – and at that time, that wasn’t at an event all full of women. And that still hasn’t changed much, unfortunately.”

She slyly added, “You see, feminists believe in equality. I don’t. Women are better.”

As another Canadian female music pioneer (from executives posts at Much Music, and Sony Music Canada) Denise Donlon, said in presenting Cecconi’ with the Brian Chater Pioneers Award in 2015 “Pegi is tenacious. I know that many of you in the room have had the pleasure to engage with her on some thorny industry issues – dogfights if you will – when she was chair of the FACTOR board, or at CMRRA, at CIRPA, or recently with the OMF..…OMG. She stands on her principles and she’s fearless about taking anyone on, from broadcasters to labels to promoters. As (singer) Molly Johnson adoringly said ‘Pegi is so high up on the chain that when she backs one artist or a writer or a publisher, she elevates all, not just her own.’ It’s true. Pegi’s a Mama Bear and will rise to her full height if provoked.”

Following the 2015 buyout of SRO by Management Inc. and Anthem Entertainment Group, Cecconi served as a consultant for its renamed Anthem Entertainment.

Cecconi’s career began as social convener at her high school. Roland Michener Secondary School, booking bands for dances there and at nearby Timmins and New Liskeard in Northern Ontario. Following graduation she hitchhiked to Toronto burst onto the Toronto music scene as a booker with the Concept 376 Agency In Toronto.

Noted Donlon, “Even in high school Pegi had visions of adventure. She negotiated a grade 13 pass (so she didn’t have to repeat the year) then boldly hitchhiked to Toronto and applied for a job at a talent booking agency. In her words, ‘I had to dress like a hooker to get hired for the job.’ And she did.”

“She was with me for under a year as a booker,” recalls Tom Wilson, owner of Concept 376. “She was very young, and very outspoken. She almost took over the office. She was Pegi. She was a good booker once she learned. Everybody has an opinion of Pegi, but I loved her.

When Danniels and a fellow booker Vic Wilson came together to launch SRO Management, Cecconi joined them, gaining valuable experience in artist management.

After few years, Cecconi went on to work as a legal secretary for noted Toronto entertainment lawyer Bernard Solomon, where she learned the bare bones of music publishing and master licensing.

In 1977, Cecconi returned to fledgling SRO Management and oversaw its entry into music publishing, helping the company grow from an artist management and booking agency into a entertainment dynamo.

“Pegi was my ultimate mentor and we became sidekicks,” says Meg Symsyk, today president/CEO of FACTOR. “ I joined Anthem/SRO in 2007, and spent the next 8 years with the company (handling global marketing, media for world album releases and tours, and Rush’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.). I had left Universal Music Canada after 10 years. I had worked with Pegi and Rush while there. At SRO & Anthem, I was blessed with daily comedy from Pegi.”

“I would say that she was a force of nature because everybody has a memory of laughing with Pegi. So many people in the industry knew her and so many people loved her and that’s a rare quality.”

Adds Danniels “Females were few and far between in the industry when she started . So If you are a woman in the music business today, she was a huge trailblazer for you. If you are a Canadian trying to succeed in the music business outside of Canada, she was a trailblazer in that way as well. I don’t think we (Canadians) would be where we are without her. She opened a lot of doors.”

The CEO of Bandwidth Music and Marketing as well as president and owner/operator of the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto, and the Bronson Centre Music Theatre in Ottawa Lisa Zbitnew agrees. “People like me wouldn’t exist without Pegi. Period. She carved a path for the rest of us. Only someone with her sheer force could create that. And she did so with humor and grace and an intelligence that was awe inspiring. She exits with the same courage that she entered. I am honored to have known her.

Throughout her career Cecconi had always fought tenaciously to get the best deals for her artists and songwriters. She also continually explored every avenue within the music industry to get all Canadian artists heard home and abroad.

“If Pegi Cecconi was your friend, you had one hell of a friend, At a birthday party for her a few months ago, I said, ‘It got to the point that people stopped being afraid of you.’ They just love you,” Danniels said.

Pegi Cecconi was the proud mother of two daughters, Toni and Kate Wales, and her sister, Elaine “Beatle” Cecconi. She had married Doug Wales in 1984. He  passed away 2011.

The family sends their heartfelt thanks to her Oncology, PSWs and Palliative teams who kept her as comfortable as possible. Pegi didn’t want a funeral but would appreciate Donations to PSP via https://pspsocietycanada.ca.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“I’ve never known anybody in any business more devoted to their job as Pegi whom I met at Concept 376 just after she had arrived in Toronto, from championing multiple causes and to bolstering all artists, and songwriters like she did. As an industry in the ‘70s. Canadians had to scratch and claw for most everything. Pegi could scratch and claw without people knowing they had been scratched and clawed. She was also renowned for her sheer screwball comic genius. She left a mark on our business that will never be erased.” Larry LeBlanc

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One of the foremost independent music promoters in America, Disco Donnie Estopinal knows how to throw a party and keep it rocking.

With his 30th-anniversary celebration, Disco Donnie draws attention to the fact that he has crafted his own lane (as far from the spotlight as it gets–but its’ impact can’t be overstated) — creating a distinctive niche under the umbrella Disco Donnie Presents which has now been rebranded as Disco Presents complete with a new logo.

As Disco Donnie explains, “What we have built is bigger than just me now – it’s about the Disco Events team and the Disco fan community, and it deserves a name that exemplifies that. We’re excited for a fresh start and heading into our biggest years ahead.”

Since its founding in 1994, Disco Events has produced over 20,000 shows and sold more than 20,000,000 tickets in over 100 cities throughout North America, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama, and the Dominican Republic.

This includes throwing raves in legit and non-legit warehouse and club venues and presenting massive multi-day festivals.

To kick off the 30th-anniversary celebrations, Disco Presents has announced Disco’s Zoolu, a three-day festival during Mardi Gras, with headliners including Illenium and RL Grime. Rabbit in The Moon (Live) is also joining for a special throwback event, “Zoolu Allstars.

Also announced were 30th anniversary-inspired sweepstakes, special ticket deals, festival activations, and fan contests.

Already holding an impressive event franchise portfolio, including Freaky Deaky, Ubbi Dubbi, Out, Ultimate Music Experience, Sunset Music Festival, and others, DDP’s most recent expansion kicked off with the acquisition of Lights All Night in 2022, further solidifying its position as Texas’s foremost independent promoter.

But there was more of Texas for Disco Donnie to conquer.

In 2023, he helmed pivotal partnerships with Third String Entertainment for So What!?, and the alternative rock festival Unsilent Night. Additionally, DDP joined forces with Illfest, and established groundbreaking alliances with Tahoe Live, and Shaquille O’Neal.

Considerably different from anything Disco Donnie has ever done before is the upcoming Texas Eclipse Festival in Burnet, Texas from April 5th to 9th  The event will take place at the 1,200-acre Reveille Peak Ranch deep within the Texas Hill Country — just 60 miles outside of Austin–with 200 acres of camping grounds, and 50 miles of trails.

In the early 1990s, you might have spotted Louisiana State University student Donnie Estopinal waiting tables in New Orleans and pondering whether to follow his mother and be an accountant.

After co-workers coaxed him to attend local dance parties, youth Donnie fell in love with the dance culture, and he decided to start throwing parties himself.

Disco Donnie’s first party in 1994, Ultra Phat, took place in a warehouse space above a local bar, Café Siam. He threw parties there throughout the year—500 people at $5 a head—until the New Orleans police shut him down for alleged unlawful booze sales and excessive noise.

In 1995, Disco Donnie started throwing wildly successful raves at the historic State Palace in New Orleans, and he became a major player in America’s emerging EDM culture.

By the mid-90s, Disco Donnie was also doing shows in Atlanta, Mississippi, Louisiana, Houston, and Austin in both legit and underground venues.

Disco Donnie’s parties at State Palace eventually caught the attention of the Drug Enforcement Agency from the New Orleans field office. Under its Operation Rave Review, undercover agents had been surveying Donnie’s raves for 8 months. The DEA raided the State Palace Theater and office on Aug.26, 2000, on the suspicion that the venue and/or Disco Donnie were selling drugs backstage.

Even though the DEA agents tore through the State Palace until 1 A.M., they found no illegal drugs other than a joint that a bartender had. After this fruitless search, the DEA officers left, and the rave party resumed as planned.

Next, Disco Donnie and State Palace Theater owners, the Brunets brothers, were indicted under a grand jury for a violation of the Crack House Statute with an ongoing criminal enterprise (Title 21 U.S. Code, Section 856(a)(2) as part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.

Facing up to 20 years in prison, and a fine of up to $500,000 or both, Disco Donnie refused to capitulate. He continued throwing raves at the State Palace despite the occasional shutdown. He also started doing weekly shows at House of Blues New Orleans.

After the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took up the case, coupled with media and public outcry, the U.S. Attorney’s Office dropped all charges against the three defendants but fined the Brunets’ corporation, Barbecue of New Orleans Inc. $100,000 for allowing the venue to be used as a site for the use and distribution of drugs.

While the American music industry was slow to recognize EDM, fans got on board on their own, without radio or TV support. Over the years, a handful of electronic festivals– HARD Summer, Electric Daisy, Moonrise, Electric Forest, and others transformed the live music business and become a vital revenue stream for the electronic music industry.

Starting in 1998 with a partnership with Pasquale Rotella, and Insomniac, Disco Donnie first worked on the flagship electronic music festival Electric Daisy Carnival, and Nocturnal Wonderland, and later brought the Electric Daisy Carnival to Dallas, Orlando, Puerto Rico, New York, and Las Vegas. He brought Nocturnal Wonderland to Austin, Beyond Wonderland to Seattle, and co-founded Electric Forest in Michigan.

In 2001, Disco Donnie moved to Ohio and expanded into producing shows in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Nashville, and Memphis.

When Robert X. Sillerman relaunched SFX Entertainment in 2012. Disco Donnie Present was its first acquisition after SFX’s revamping. Then in 2016, SFX Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At the end of the year, the company went private and was renamed LiveStyle, with Sillerman exiting the company.

Disco Donnie bought back his company from LiveStyle in 2020 and never looked back.

As one of the leading live music presenters, you have built up quite a dynamic dance empire.

The rebranding of Disco Donnie Presents to Disco Presents celebrates your company’s 30th anniversary and is an acknowledgment of your unquestionable expertise as an innovator in developing new shows and finding new venues. 

Luckily, I have made a lot of relationships, and hopefully, I have always treated everybody fairly. I am constantly being sent new venues and new concepts. and we are always looking. I am always challenging my team to come up with new ideas where we already do events; but what kind of events can we do that are different? That can make a statement and leave a mark.

The umbrella term EDM–with its multiple subgenres–is as mainstream as it gets today. It has long shifted from its early underground warehouse roots to the big festival main stages, and many DJs are now celebrities as they challenge the distinction between DJing and live performance while promoters like you are pushing for the next thing.

Disco Presents will most likely produce 700 shows this year as Disco Donnie Presents also did last year.

You know, pre-COVID we were hitting probably a thousand shows a year. Now we are, yes, in the 700 range.

After COVID-19 restrictions shut down the touring business for most of 2020 and 2021, you hosted the first major festival in America in 2021 since the pandemic took hold: Ubbi Dubbi at Texas Motorplex in Ennis, Texas on April 24-25 with a lineup of top EDM talent including Illenium, Kaskade, Destructo, Joyryde and others. It was reduced capacity, but still a major event that turned heads in the industry.

When we walked in at Ubbi Dubbi, and I saw everything that was going on, I turned to my wife and said, “I can’t believe that I actually do this. This is what I do.”

You only gave your team a seven-week warning that you had committed to a return to a festival model with the Ubbi Dubbi event in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It wasn’t for me; it was for all of us. For our mental health. We needed this, we really needed this.”

This year’s Ubbi Dubbi Festival again takes place at Panther Island, Fort Worth, Texas, May 25^th & 26^th featuring Afrojack, Galantis, Elderbrook, Audien, Le Youth, Crankdat, Kaleena Zanders, Juelz, nimino, IT’S MURPH, and more.

2023 wasn’t as difficult for live music in America as some had predicted.

I think the confidence in the air was good. There was a lot of traffic near the end of the year as a lot of people were touring. The big stuff still performed well. I think that a lot of the smaller and middle stuff didn’t do so hot.

2024 is shaping up to be a banner year for you.

Yeah, everything is going well. I am going to Austin in early March for iLLfest and to do another site visit for Texas Eclipse. Then I will be going back a week before Texas Eclipse to get ready for the big Eclipse show coming up in Texas in April. That’s kind of the largest show that I have done on my own.

What office staff do you work with?

We’ve never really had an office. We were mobile before COVID. Our team is around 20 full-time people and they work all over the country. Some are in California. Some are in Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Texas, and some are in New York. We are spread out everywhere. Then, of course, if we do a festival or another show, we probably hire another thousand people.

Meanwhile, married to a Puerto Rican, you live outside North America.

Yes, in Puerto Rico. I’ve been living there for 13 years.

You have been doing artist-curated, all-inclusive destination music festivals in Mexico since 2021.

Our next one is in Cancun at the end of April (April 26-28) called Paradise Blue Festival at Paradisus Cancun. They are artist-driven, so it’s all headlining bands. It’s really good seeing them all come together. They (fans) are all there for the same reason. It is just a whole different experience. Everybody is into the same thing. It’s just very rewarding to see the crowds and see how happy they are.

Are there restrictions or obstacles to doing shows in Mexico?

I’ve done shows in Mexico previously, and in Panama, the Dominican Republic, and in Puerto Rico. There are challenges working outside the United States, but we have been able to work through that and work with resorts. They have been great at issuing permits and helping us with all of the red tape that we need to do a show in Mexico. In that way, it is different. There is a language barrier between us and the staff, but we have been able to balance that out. Every time we do a show down there, we are getting better, and better at it. We will probably do a lot more.

Other than the corporate rebrand, you have recently overseen a number of strategic collaborations including Illfest, Tahoe Live, Shaquille O’Neal, and the pop-punk festival So What?! Also, you moved DP’s flagship Halloween festival Freaky Deaky from Austin to Houston.

As well, in what may be the crowning glory of your career, you have partnered with Mitch Morales’s Probably Nothing event company for Texas Eclipse April 5th-9^th, 2024 which may reset the boundaries of conventional festivals by converging music, space, science, art, tech, and wellness.

Did COVID coupled with the live music industry retrenchment, brought about further by layoffs, and consolidations of booking and promoter companies, lead to a period of reflection for you to think about diversifying Disco Presents’ portfolio?

That wasn’t so much a questioning period. That was more like, “Oh shit.” I think what you are seeing is that over a…. I sold my company 10 years ago, and I bought it back during the first two weeks of everything shutting down (due to COVID-19). That wasn’t so much a questioning period. That was more like, “Oh shit.” I think what you are seeing is that over a…. I sold my company 10 years ago, and I bought it back during the first two weeks of everything shutting down (due to COVID-19). So once I got my company back, and everything came back, I was able to be more fluid and be able to make different moves when you are independent than when you are part of a larger company. You don’t have to get approval on everything. That kind of thing would hold me back and slow me down.

Now that I am back as an independent a lot of deals are coming my way. People are reaching out to me. I’m hearing, “I wanted to work with you before, but you were with a big company. I want to work with someone independently. I see what you are doing. I have this venue. So…”

In 2023, you moved your flagship Halloween celebration festival, Freaky Deaky, from Houston to Austin’s Travis County Exposition Center. Why?

Two things. The venue we had used in 2019 was sold. The land was sold so we didn’t have a home. We had known that this was coming so we had been looking for alternative venues in the area for three or four years.

Freaky Deaky was founded by React Presents in 2008, which began a big Halloween party in Austin featuring carnival rides, games, costume contests, art, music and more.

After years of bringing Houston and Dallas “Something Wicked” and “Something Wonderful,” you chose not to return to those festivals in 2018. You partnered with React Presents on Freaky Deaky and announced that the festival would be held at the Sam Houston Raceway in northwest Houston supported by four headliners, Excision, DJ Snake, Porter Robinson, and Kaskade, which sent the EDM community and the internet in a frenzy.

You were quoted as saying, “We moved from Houston to Austin just so people wouldn’t complain.”

Well, they complained anyway. But I did a $99 ticket—which is like a price from 12 years ago—just to buffer against people being mad that it was moving.  People bought those and they were then very excited about moving Freaky Deaky to Austin.

After Travis Scott’s AstroWorld tragedy in 2021 it has become very difficult to secure festival venue space near Houston.

Yes, just because of all of the dynamics. and the things that you would need to do to produce a show there. I don’t even know if there’s been another festival there, but it is definitely a challenge. I had done festivals in and around the Austin area before. I have been doing shows there since probably since ’96. So, it just made a lot of sense to move it for one year as we continue to look for another venue to return to next year.

(At the rapper Travis Scott’s hometown November 5th, 2021, AstroWorld Festival in Houston, 10 young people were killed, and many more were injured, some severely, due to “crowd crush” or “crowd surge” as hundreds had rushed the event perimeter.)

You also became involved with several pivotal events. One is Shaquille O’Neal, and the touring live event series, Shaq’s ‘Bass All Stars. Will that type of celebrity partnership become more common in the future? It’s the type of affiliation that provides razzle-dazzle in the mix. I’d go to a festival just to see Shaq.

Yeah. He wanted to do his festival, and he has a house in Dallas. We had worked together before. So his team called us up, and they asked, “Do you guys want to partner with us on a festival?” So we put Shaq’s Bass All Stars Festival. together, and about 14,000 people turned up. Sometimes you don’t know what you are going to get. So those numbers were surprising to all of us. That it was so big, and that it was so well received by the community.

The one-day Shaq’s’Bass All Stars event at the Panther Island Pavilion in Fort Worth on Sept. 18^th, 2023, featured one of the deepest bass lineups of 2023. One day of 16 of bass music’s most prestigious acts— Alison Wonderland, Sullivan King, Crankdat, Kai Wachi, and LAYZ; all for fans of trap, dubstep, drum and bass, and melodic bass on two stages.

Of course, Shaq is basketball royalty, a player that was the dominant center of his era. He won four NBA titles. Under the artist name, Diesel, he has become respected as a true artist and entertainer amongst his peers and fans. 

He’s a rock star there. He’s a rock star everywhere but especially there. The local media, the local TV stations, everybody was announcing the event, and talking about it all the time. They showed up and videoed the show. We allowed them five minutes. We are now working on this year.

Tell me about your joint venture with Dallas-based Third String Entertainment. Why get involved with Mike Ziemer and Orlando Mendoza and present the So What?! Music Festival, and the alternative rock festival Unsilent Night under the Disco Punk banner?

Third String launched So What!? in 2008, with the eclectic event being early on soon-to-be stars like G-Eazy, A Day To Remember, and Bring Me The Horizon. Showcasing artists in punk, hip-hop, metal, and more, the event’s headliners have included Rae Sremmurd, Simple Plan, 100 Gecs, and more.

Mike is married to Anna (Anna Marie Taylor Cavitt-Ziemer) who worked with me (as regional marketing & operations manager) for a long time.

(A formidable live event figure Anna, aka AMC, is from Dallas and has been working on festival events for decades, racking up more than 1,000 shows. Her career kicked off at 17 when she worked at her first major festival, Tomorroworld.

So we were kind of in the same circles, and we were trading information and venue numbers. We had been talking about working together for a couple of years. Whether it was as one combo or we would do an EDM festival one weekend, and they would do their festival the next weekend, and we would share costs. In 2022, I almost got involved with So What?! We had a long conversation, but it was rushed, so it never got done. Last year we had a full year to delve into it and work out a partnership. It’s doing very well.

You and your team also were quite busy already.

We were busy, but we still have a team. Once we put something in the system we can start working on new things. So this made a lot of sense. We have worked on expanding So What?! this year. That is why they wanted to work with us because we could take it to other places and grow off the brand.

As Mike Ziemer has said about So What?!, “It’s bigger than Texas.”

Correct. It’s still safe so they are definitely onto something.

(So What!? will take place at Panther Island Pavilion in Fort Worth on June 2^nd and June 3^rd. Among those that will be featured are: Boys Like Girls, Mayday Parade, Silverstein, The Devil Wears Prada, 30H!3, Iann Dior, Knuckle Puck, Norma Jean, Oh Sleeper, the Secret Handshake, Veil of Maya, Asking Alexandria, P.O.D., Switchfoot, Reliant K, the Amity Affliction, Attila, Currentws, Dying Wish, He Is Legend, Saosin, the Almost, Thousand Below, and many others.)

At the same time, you picked up a co-present with LIVE, the brand behind Tahoe Live, Salt Lake Live, and Park City Live.

Yeah, new events. We did Tahoe Live (on Dec. 15th and 16th, 2023 featuring Rezz, DJ Diesel, Disco Lines, Boogie T, Eazybaked, J. Worra, Kowta b2b Downlo, Levity, Nostalgix, Rusko, Ship Wrek, Truth, Cat Liu, and Daneger). When the guy who does Tahoe Live contacted me, I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve wanted to do this because most of my shows are in warm weather areas. So a big part of the year’s shows are blocked (booked) out. You can’t do shows in June, July and August. Then it’s too cold to do a show in January, and February. Basically, six months out of the year, you are blocked out. So it’s really cool to do a show at the bottom of a ski resort and be able to then take it around to multiple ski resorts.

Who wants to be watching acts while freezing their ass off?

People are used to it. If they wear the right amount of clothes, drink the right spirits and stuff, and step around enough, they are going to be fine. As long as it’s not a crazy minus 30 below or something like that. If we had something we’d probably have to talk about not doing the show. If it’s going to be in the high 20s to the high 40s, okay. And the shows go from 3 PM to 10 PM. So there’s a lot of time for a lot of daylight.

Tahoe Live is quite different from anything you’ve done.

Yeah. I’m always trying to do new things, and it’s exciting. We hadn’t done a show in the snow before. So we learned something new.

Also quite different from what you’ve done is the Texas Eclipse Festival in Burnet, Texas from April 5^th to 9^th.  

Seeing the eclipse at this venue will definitely be a very exciting time for our team.

The April 8th eclipse is expected to last 4 minutes and 20 seconds, and will be seen across Texas and a large swath of North America as it heads east, with the first location in continental North America to experience totality being Mexico’s Pacific coast at around 11:07 a.m. PDT., according to an information page created by NASA. The eclipse is expected to be visible in Texas at approximately 12:23 p.m. CDT.

The Texas Eclipse Festival event will take place at the 1,200-acre Reveille Peak Ranch deep within the Texas Hill Country — just 60 miles outside of Austin–with 200 acres of camping grounds, and 50 miles of trails.

We looked at a couple of spots, and this one is an hour away from Austin, and an hour away from San Antonio. So there are a lot of flights for people to come in.

The venue is huge. It’s rolling hills, and there are lakes and trees and bluebonnets everywhere which will be in season. The venue is really special.

Reveille Peak Ranch is a working ranch designed for outdoor adventure events.

Yeah, BMX and others do events there as well. They do military training. There are so many different things going on. It’s fully operational year-round. So it’s not like going to a piece of land that doesn’t have anything; that doesn’t have any infrastructure or anything. This is already built out. Still, we have a lot of work to do.

Describe the initial meeting when this eclipse idea came up. “You know there’s an eclipse coming in 2024. Do you think we can build an event around that, Danny? What do you think?” Is that how the discussion went?

It (the conversation) actually started after the last one (eclipse) in Oregon in 2017. People that I know, and people that I worked with, had gone to that (the weeklong Oregon Eclipse Festival 2017 at Big Summit Prairie private ranch attended by 30,000 people) and worked at that show. They were like, “You need to put this on your radar that the eclipse is going to be in Texas in 2024.”

I was like (joking), “Oh yeah. I might be dead by then.” So probably about two years ago, we started having discussions again. Then I was looking at another venue, and my partner Mitch Morales with Probably Nothing (an experiential company that specializes in creating unique activations at large events and festivals) found this venue. So I checked it out. And that was it. Basically the location of the venue, the owner, the look of it, and they already do events there. It is almost a perfect venue for what this is going to be.

The August 2017 eclipse was the first with a path of totality crossing the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the U.S. since the solar eclipse of 1918. Also, its path of totality made landfall exclusively within the United States, making it the first such eclipse since the country’s declaration of independence in 1776.

There are so many ancillary aspects of doing the eclipse event with Thought leaders including NASA Astronaut Nicole Stott, Dr. Sian Proctor (SpaceX Astronaut), MAPS founder Rick Doblin, and artists rooted from various cultures from all corners of the world such as STS9, Seth Troxler, and a tribute to Goa Gil. 

Among the production collaborators are Symbiosis (California), Re: birth (Japan), Strawberry Fields (Australia), Earth Frequency (Australia), Bachstelzen (Germany), Beloved (Oregon), Origin (South Africa), Meadows in the Mountain (Bulgaria), Bass Coast (Canada), Ometeotl (Mexico), DisQo PereZoso (Costa Rica), Cosmic Convergence (Guatemala).

We are working with those people who organized the eclipse event in Oregon in 2017. We want to keep Texas Eclipse just as true because I heard that event was amazing, and we really want to keep it true to the roots of that as much as possible. So we have a lot of different collaborators from all over the world, Besides the music, we will have artists, speakers, comedians, interactive areas, and we will even have astronauts. All kinds of different things that we are going to have. It is one of the most challenging things that we have ever done. It’s exciting.

Crowd safety is a primary concern for all promoters today, Texas authorities are very wary of outdoor events. They aren’t likely to understand EDM either though their kids likely attend your concerts.

Crowd safety is a big concern, and we spend a lot of money trying to make sure whatever festival comes through our doors that there are responsibilities that we need to protect, and keep them safe. So we spend a lot of time and effort doing that. Luckily, with our crowds, they are not trying to rush to the front, or trying to rush anywhere. If there’s a bunch of people somewhere, they probably won’t go that way. They will go to the empty space, right? So it’s a little bit different here (in Texas). They don’t have to be close up to the artist to enjoy the show and get the full experience. They can be in the back. They can be in the middle. Some people want to be in the front. But a lot of people aren’t trying to overcrowd a place. We are very lucky on that side.

You did a show at the Austin Music Hall in 1996.

That was my first dalliance with Texas.

You came full force to Texas in 1997 doing shows in Houston and Austin while you were also doing shows in Atlanta, Mississippi, and Louisiana in both legit and underground venues featuring Frankie Bones, Paul Oakenfold, the Crystal Method, Keoki, Clint Mansell, LTJ Bukem, Derrick Carter, Freaky Chakra, and Single Cell Orchestra and others.

What first attracted you to Texas as a promoter?

It made a lot of sense for me because I was living in New Orleans, and they were doing a lot of shows in Texas and we would travel over there. I would promote over there and test different ideas. Kinda see what they were doing.

This was back when practically every major American city had their own promoters. Certainly, that was true of Texas.

It was kind of like the mob. I couldn’t come in from New Orleans and go into Houston or Dallas because they already had all their families there. And they were all fighting. But behind the scenes. I was backing people in Houston, Austin, and Dallas. That was in the mid to late ‘90s Then the market crashed after 9/11. It was already going down; we just couldn’t see it. And hip hop came on so strong in 2001 and all those (traditional) promoters just went away. They either disappeared or stopped doing shows. Also with the government crackdown (on drugs). It just didn’t make a lot of sense with all of the risk, and all the eyeballs on what was going on to be doing shows. That was kind of when I started reaching back out to the promoters, the old promoters, saying, “Hey why don’t we start doing shows again? I will back you.” I didn’t have any money, but I had “pretend money.” I was pretending that I had money. “I will back you, and we will do shows. And when the whole scene comes back, we will do cheap tickets” — and now we are talking about being online because we are starting to give people data. “We will do cheap tickets and when the market comes back we will be able to run it. We will be in charge of it.” That is how I kind of worked my way through checks in Houston, Dallas, Austin San Antonio, El Paso, McAllen, and South Padre. I’ve done probably about 10 or 12 cities in Texas. So Texas has been a good market for me.

As dance music began to evolve from the disco era, there was considerable institutional resistance to rhythmic-based urban music. At that point, you were promoting EDM, which larger promoters weren’t interested in.

Yeah, at that point, nobody wanted dance music. It just wasn’t cool at the time.

By 1990, however, huge-scale, one-off raves were transforming house and techno into events full of lights and lasers, fun-fair attractions, and stellar DJ lineups. However, I can’t see Michael Rapino or Louis Messina being Godfathers of Rave in that time.

(Laughing) Maybe. If I went to those guys, and said, “I want to use your venue.” They would say, “Well, of course.” I worked with Louis’ son Jeff when they opened up to program music in the mid-2000s in Houston. They were down to recommend me. It was still a night for them, but it (dance music) really wasn’t on their radar then. There were some people that were into it at Live Nation and AEG, but mostly it wasn’t a cool thing to do.

You bought back your company from LiveStyle in 2020. Robert, X. Sillerman had rebooted SFX Entertainment in 2012 with a focus on the electronic dance music industry.

Defaulting on a $10.8 million loan after missing an interest payment of $3 million in January 2016, SFX Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At the end of the year, the company went private and was renamed LiveStyle, with Sillerman exiting the company.

Under CEO Randy Phillips, LiveStyle emerged as the new corporate umbrella for Disco Donnie Presents, React, Made, and Beatport.

When Sillerman relaunched SFX Entertainment in 2012. Disco Donnie Present was its acquisition after SFX’s revamping.

You then lured (and SFX acquired) EDM promoters such as ID&T, Made Event Totem, React, Flavorus, and Gary Richards’ HARD Events as well as digital music store Beatport. Festivals like TomorrowWorld, and Mysteryland. SFX also acquired the event company Life In Color as well as the Miami Marketing Group which owned 8 nightclubs.

I was there from day one for the second SFX. It was a crazy scenario. I was basically a conduit to bringing in all of these people. I couldn’t tell them who they were meeting with. I paid for them to come to New York, and I didn’t even have a contract or anything like that. I was doing this on a handshake. So I’d pay for them to come to New York. I’d meet with them at a restaurant down the street, and I’d tell them who they were meeting with. Then I would bring them in to meet Bob, and then that meeting would go on. I would then go down and meet with somebody else, and I’d bring that person in as the other meeting was ending. It was a crazy, crazy start from the get-go.

Sillerman founded SFX Broadcasting which came to own more than 70 radio stations in 20 markets which he sold in 1977 to Capstar Broadcasting for $2.1 billion. Then under the SFX Entertainment banner in the late 1990s, Sillerman spent about $2 billion buying promoters and other entertainment properties, including snapping up 11 regional companies and 82 venues.

Sillerman sold SFX Entertainment to Clear Channel Entertainment for an estimated $4 billion in 2005, in hopes of synergizing its live and radio businesses. When that didn’t happen Clear Channel spun off its live entertainment division to form free-standing, publicly traded Live Nation.

Coming from the EDM sector how would they even know about Sillerman who (came from broadcasting, and then the major live music event world?

I had read the book of the first SFX, so I was aware of him. Also because of (being involved with) the State Palace (in New Orleans), I was around that (live music) business and knew what was going on with people getting bought up. So he wasn’t totally off my radar.

But what led to your affiliation with Sillerman who had announced a plan to spend $1 billion on the acquisitions of local and regional dance music promoters?

I had a partnership with Pasquale Rotella, and Insomniac (since 1998) doing (the flagship electronic music festival Electric Daisy Carnival and Nocturnal Wonderland. We did a lot of things (including from 2008-2012, bringing EDC to Dallas, Orlando, Puerto Rico, New York, and Las Vegas, and also bringing Nocturnal Wonderland to Austin, Beyond Wonderland to Seattle, and co-founding Electric Forest in Michigan. We had been working together in some form of fashion since ’98. So it was a good long run

Partnerships are notoriously difficult.

When that went sideways, I bounced out of that and had meetings. I had a debt and I started shopping around this new company with different people who were interested in the project and in financing it. Then I met Bob Sillerman, and he signed off on the whole project, I signed up on the whole roll up right there, and he told me to get to work.

How was Sillerman to deal with?

He was a character, and he took big risks. Some of them worked, and some of them didn’t. He definitely changed my life. I don’t think that anyone would have been able to pull off what he did. I appreciate him, but you didn’t know what you were going to get in these meetings. He would say some stuff that could possibly be offensive to a lot of people. Some people reacted, and got it that he was joking, and others saw him wearing a suit on a Sunday with a fake wig, and a “F— You, You Miserable F—” T-shirt in a meeting, and the reaction was like, “Wow.” You didn’t know what you were going to get or what he was going to say but it definitely kept everyone on their toes.

Gathering that many local and regional dance-music promoters together into a cohesive force would have been a nightmare.

We had meetings with the SFX Entertainment promoters around the world, and you put 20 people in one room with these huge egos, and you ask them to make sacrifices like, “If this guy doesn’t take our offer in Australia, then we aren’t going to book him in New York. We are going to put our foot down.” Then the guy from New York would go, “No I need that guy. I have to protect my business here. I can’t do that.” Putting everybody in a symbiotic room to work together was not as easy a process as we thought it would be.

Who was operating LiveStyle when you bought back your company in 2020?

There was a group of investors that had taken it out of bankruptcy; that had bought I guess the debt. Or whatever was left of the rest of the company, and started running it as LiveStyle,

Why become an independent again?

It was kind of two-fold. I had gotten assurances that I could kind of have first right refusal (on shows). That is I would be able to match any offer that came in for my company. And the time came immediately when everything shut down (with COVID-19). We had a lot of shows on sale, and I had pleaded that everybody would get refunds. And I kind of got called to the principal’s office, and I was told, “Hey you can’t offer everybody refunds.” That was like a red flag to me because my name is on the company, and that was going to be an unacceptable process for me. If we couldn’t give people back their money right now, when could we? That is when they (the fans) needed it (money) most. I was concerned about our fans.

The second part of it was that I saw what happened at Paradigm (Talent) where within a week of closing down (the industry due to COVID-19) people I had been working with for 20 years lost their jobs. I was concerned about the people that I had worked with. Who was expendable? That conversation was already starting to happen two weeks in. So I needed to step in, take control, and make sure that these decisions were made by me.

Paradigm Talent was first to deliver a shock wave throughout the industry when 250 staffers of a work force of 600 were laid off weeks following the President of the United States Donald Trump declaring a National Emergency concerning COVID-19 on Friday, March 13th, 2020, As Paradigm Talent severed its music operation in 2021, Casey Wasserman acquired its North American live music representation business and then launched a new agency Wasserman Music

The unprecedented shutdown/postponement of live entertainment that followed was unanimous, and worldwide, leading to a series of financial moves by others designed to protect their businesses against the closedown as concerts and sporting events were canceled. Everybody was trying to figure out what were the new business dynamics.

Over the years, many promoters that had earlier sold their companies reclaimed them. They found that having an independent niche was the way for them to protect their staff and regional turf and make the most money. Promoters like Danny Zelisko, Louis Messina, Larry Magid, and Michael Cohl.

I’ve heard those stories about people who bought their company back. That was always a goal of mine after I sold it. A lot of people had left. A lot of people went when everything got a little bit tough with the bankruptcy. All of the principals of the SFX 2 company left and I was like, “I’m going to just wait this out because I know I will get it back one day.” So here we are.

Since buying back your company you are among a handful of leading live music independents in the world.

Yeah, there’s a lot of us, and we talk and try to band together a little bit here and see if there’s something that we can protect ourselves from a larger company.

You are from New Orleans.

I was born and raised there. My oldest son Raul just graduated from Tulane, and now he is in Vet school at The Ohio State University. I lived in New Orleans, and I never wanted to leave but I ended up marrying a Puerto Rican. So here we are.

You attended LSU (Louisiana State University) in Baton Rouge. What was your major?

Accounting.

Did you graduate?

Yeah. I was supposed to take over my mother’s CPA firm. I didn’t take a 360-degree or a 180-degree turn. I basically went right down the interstate and got off at an exit.

New Orleans is America’s Party Town, a marvelous place to promote shows.

I was very lucky to be doing shows there. There were so many things going on. There are so many different interesting artists then happening in the city. Nothing to do with the rave scene. I was able to pull them in and expose our crowd to all of these different crazy things. So I was very lucky to be doing shows in New Orleans. Nobody was really paying attention to me.

Easily recognizable by your crazy outfits, you became a key figure of the ecstasy-fueled early 2000s rave scene in the city. Were you a wild character back in the day?

(Laughing) I’ve straddled that line. I can do both. I was a rabble-rouser. I got into some trouble, but I was basically reserved. I was half party man, and half reserved. That is how I was able to work my way through when most of the scene were party people. I was able to do both.

EDM jumped from the underground to the mainstream but when you began it was underground in America. Many DJs didn’t want outsiders to know about it. While the music industry has been too slow to recognize EDM in America, the kids got on board on their own, without radio or TV support.

That was the name of the game back then. I was young and dumb. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

In 1994, you threw your first party, Ultra Phat, in a warehouse space above Café Siam. The following year, you started throwing wildly successful raves at the historic State Palace it would have been like, “Look I’m legit. I have a big theatre here.”

Yeah, that was a game-changer. We were still doing arena stuff, but this was kind of the beginning of seeing how we should be doing things. At the time, they had a lot of concerts going on. Red Hot Chili Peppers and Primus and all of these other shows. I was able to sit in on the settlements and notice the business side of it all. That was something I hadn’t thought of before. This was just a hobby for me. But to be able to look at that from the bird’s eye view of what the music business was and realize how far we were away from that; and realize where we needed to go.

EDM is a fairly new music genre. Just under three decades from throwing parties in warehouses. Just look at its history from DEA surveillance that you endured. Meanwhile, EDM splintered into so many subgroups and reached mainstream status, but the genre hasn’t been that well documented. It really was the wild wild west for promoters like you when you started out in 1994, and it stayed that way for many years.

Yeah, look it was going on before I discovered it; from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. There’s been different iteration to it, but it has morphed into what it is now. In the ‘90s, my original events were in warehouses, and they were all ages with no alcohol. We didn’t have any security. We didn’t have any permits. We didn’t have any insurance.

At the same time around the country, there were other young promoters going through what you were going through. Young Turks working in warehouses and random shows.

There were definitely some big scenes all over the country, and we were watching what they were doing; trying to see what artists they were looking at on their fliers. We would send fliers to the record stores in those cities, and they would send fliers back to us for us to distribute. So we were looking at what they were doing, and they were watching what we were doing. I was communicating with a lot of promoters around the country about doing flier swaps, but also gathering information from each other, and trying to share what was going on, and how things were going, and exchanging information, “This guy is great” or “I’ve got this sound guy that you should use” Or this light designer. We were swapping information earlier on about what was going on around the country.

All of you were also hiring artists that weren’t going to cost an arm and a leg. Most were emerging artists. There were very few real stars in the genre in those days. You and your event peers were building your own star system.

Look, I had the choice when I first got into the scene. It was to be a promoter or a DJ. I remember that I used to pay the artists and they would sleep on my couch, and I would make $1,500. I was like “I’m the big boss. I’m the one making all of the big money.” Now I pay the DJ $500,000 and I still make $1,500.

You are joking of course.

Yes. But it was just different then. A lot of them DJs) didn’t have agents yet. A lot of them worked at record stores, and we would call them where they worked, and book them right then on the phone. They would come down and perform with no contract.

At the same time, audiences were also learning about the music and the emerging DJ acts as well. Initially, audiences were happy with most DJs and then popular DJs emerged and more stars came. But in the early years, you’d go to a rave, and the music was there, and was it a good or bad DJ? That was the sole criterion.

It was pre-internet, so they had maybe a rave dance section at Tower Records. They had some very limited CDs in there. But there were no superstar DJs at the time. Basically, we were just basing bookings on, “Oh, this guy is from New York. I’m going to check him out.” We really didn’t know. There wasn’t a lot of information about what songs they had or even what they even played. There just wasn‘t that knowledge, especially not way down in New Orleans, right? They probably knew a lot more, and were more attuned to it all in L.A., and in New York. The DJs knew because they bought the records, and they played the records. So the local DJs knew but the fans going to the shows weren’t really going to see DJ so and so. They were just going to be DJ so and so from Baltimore or Detroit, anywhere that wasn’t New Orleans people would come out and see the artists. If somebody would come all the way from L.A. it was, “I gotta go and see this guy”, right?

There definitely were different sounds coming out of everywhere. Chicago had a sound. L.A. had a sound. New York had its own sound.

While you have hit a career stride in recent years, you work in a youth culture and business. When you started, you were the kid working alongside older people. At 54, you likely are the oldest person in the room at times. Are you comfortable with that?

I didn’t think I would be doing this for this long. And now I don’t want to stop.

Being older in entertainment can be a significant asset due to having a history of building extensive contacts through contested battles.

Yeah. I feel good. I’m working on new projects too. Not all will happen, but we are getting a few new things launched and then we will be good.

Larry LeBlanc is widely recognized as one of the leading music industry journalists in the world. Before joining CelebrityAccess in 2008 as senior editor, he was the Canadian bureau chief of Billboard from 1991-2007 and Canadian editor of Record World from 1970-80. He was also a co-founder of the late Canadian music trade, The Record.

He has been quoted on music industry issues in hundreds of publications including Time, Forbes, and the London Times. He is co-author of the book “Music From Far And Wide,” and a Lifetime Member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

He is the recipient of the 2013 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, recognizing individuals who have made an impact on the Canadian music industry.

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Theresa Vibberts has a solid reputation for being a shrewd businesswoman who has done much in shaping the performing arts sector to compete in today’s competitive consumer marketplace.

Scrappy, classy, and creative, Vibberts is also an astute judge of both the musical merits and business power of her clients—some of the world’s leading instrumental soloists, conductors, and ensembles across a broad spectrum of the performing arts, including classical music, jazz, world music, dance, and more.

In her current position since 2018, Vibberts serves as an artist manager and oversees CAMI Music’s North American business and booking strategies.

At CAMI Music since 2011, Vibberts previously served as Southeast Booking Agent; East Coast & Midwest Booking agent; Artist Manager & East Coast/Midwest Booking; and as the company’s VP, Artist Manager, and National Director of Bookings responsible for booking national tours, producing promotional events, and creating audience development strategies.

Along the way, Vibberts has represented global artists and companies such as the American Ballet Theater & Studio Company, MUMMENSCHANZ, National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine, Ballet Folklórico de México, Cirque FLIP Fabrique; Lang Lang, Lil Buck, Chad Lawson, Jules Buckley, Ray Chen, Cameron Carpenter, Pablo Sainz Villegas, Savion Glover, the Queen’s Cartoonists, Howard Shore, Max Richter, Sir James Galway, Jon Batiste, and percussionist Antonio Sanchez’s “Birdman Live” film project.

As well, Vibberts has overseen highly successful collaborative partnerships with other agencies on behalf of such artists as Farruquito (with IMG Artists), and Max Richter with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (with Jensen Artists).

Prior to joining CAMI Music, Vibberts was head of production at photographer Danny Clinch’s Three on the Tree Productions in New York where she worked on music videos for Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen, Blind Melon, and others. She also coordinated the production of festival DVDs for Outside Lands, and Bonnaroo, and worked as a producer on the 2011 film, “Live at Preservation Hall: Louisiana Fairytale,” featuring the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and My Morning Jacket.

Previously, she interned for a year in the music department of “Saturday Night Live.”

Vibberts holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the esteemed Capital University Conservatory of Music in Columbus, Ohio.

At CAMI Music, you both oversee talent management as a general manager, and bookings as an agent. A departure from the industry norm?

Within our slice of the business, within the performing arts world, there are very,

very few people who are both general managers of artists and booking agents. I do that. A wonderful talent, Ted Kurland (CEO, The Kurland Agency), also does that. But there really aren’t that many who play both roles the way that I do.

So the norm in the performing arts world is that there are those who only manage or only book?

In my world, absolutely. That’s usually the way that it works. Somebody will either be a booking agent or a manager. But not both.

As manager, do you negotiate recording, and film & TV-related contracts?

Absolutely. I work with labels and work on recording contracts. I also work on hiring publicists and work with things like podcasts, where I will hire a sub-agent to represent the podcast. I do everything and anything.

Most discussions of the future of performing arts tend to dwell on national and state issues. But the arts are truly local. Every small town in America has an arts program, whether it is theatre, dance, music, or whatever. Meanwhile, arts and cultural organizations have undergone tough economic times in recent years resulting in programming cutbacks, and increased attempts at fund-raising.

None of us have ever experienced anything like the changes of the past 5 years, including the continuing impact of COVID; the breakdown of music distribution that led to the rise of streaming which is now buckling under its own weight; and the convergence of music and social media.

Meanwhile, performers in all genres, and at all levels, face disastrous skyrocketing touring costs —with hotel, food, fuel, vehicle rentals, and personnel costs rapidly rising.

It is insane, especially for those coast-to-coast 7 to 12-week tours. It used to be the longer the tour the lower the costs. You could amortize it, but that’s not even the case anymore. It (touring) is getting prohibitive. The problem with the performing arts specifically, and especially with a dance company or a theatre company, is that they can’t supplement income with album sales or streaming. So, it (touring) is just an extra challenge. It is really hard.

With most rock, country, and hip-hop shows, there are from 15 to 20 to 40 personnel traveling. With a theatrical production or with an orchestra, you are essentially moving a Broadway show from city to city, and at each stage of the process now, the tour company is whittling down its choices.

If a date or two is blown out due to COVID, or by the weather, with a theatrical production or with an orchestra, and if it is halfway through the tour, then that could affect the financial welfare of the entire tour, especially impacting those performers from overseas.

Oh yes because the margins are so tight on the budgets with everything that you just said. As a business, we are all trying to kind of re-invent how we are doing this, and there is just no clear answer. The music industry, it’s not like law or going into medicine, where it’s clear-cut. You become an intern. Then being a resident, and then attending, and then…

You first study, graduate, and then go on to work between 10 to 14 years to become a doctor.

The music industry is not like that. There’s a million different ways to be successful, and in half of those ways, none of us have figured out yet what they are, which is both exciting and fun, but challenging also.

In bringing an international orchestra to America for a tour, if there’s a COVID incident, even one or two dates lost, it could be a nightmare.

Yes, with COVID we have the emergence of a new tour personnel, The COVID Safety Officer. With the Ukrainian Symphony tour, we had as many COVID tests as they could find. We are lucky in that the venues are caught up by now. They have strict protocols in place.

When playing bigger venues, the same union staff is in place whereas with PACs (performing arts centers) you may be dealing backstage with temporary freelance crews or with volunteers.

Yes, it’s true. But the volunteers are there because they want to be there. So they are doing everything that they can so they can be there. And they are doing it the right way. I almost don’t want to say it because I don’t want to jinx it, but we have been relatively lucky in terms of the amount of touring our artists do on the CAMI roster. It’s huge. On the last touring cycle that is ramping up about now, we were pretty lucky. We had a few people that had to leave tours, and we had to replace them, and that is always really challenging. Then we test, and we do the test after the test. There’s no easy way, but we’ve been powering through.

You are well-placed on both the commercial side of live music and in the performing arts world, a sector considered high maintenance, particularly with what has gone on with COVID.  One so exact in detail. You usually aren’t dealing with a few members of a band and their representatives or just a handful of venue bookers.

In normal times, you deal with nearly 40 diverse parts, and you are trying to amass 20 to 40 dates, 18 months out front.

I actually really enjoy the length of time that we have in the performing arts. I started in the rock and roll world (working for photographer Danny Clinch), and before that, I interned at “Saturday Night Live” which is about the quickest turnaround for booking an artist. You are absolutely right about the performing arts in that we are planning one, two years ahead of time, and even three years in advance.

I do everything from booking the great orchestras from all over the world to booking acts for jazz clubs where, of course, the timing is completely different. But I really like the longer booking time. What I like about it is that first of all, it’s incredible for the artist in that they become connected to being like a salaried employee. So they can plan their lives a year or two years ahead. They can plan family vacations, and they know how much they are going to make. It gives them a basic business model much further in advance.

With COVID subsiding have you been able to return to that traditional 8 to 14-month performing arts booking cycle?

I am happy to report, yes. That is shown very clearly by the fact that my entire industry is gearing up right now for fall booking conferences. We will go to regional booking conferences and start planning with promoters and presenters for their Fall 2024, and their Spring 2025. That is what my team is working on right now, and that is what we are selling. The summer is always a little slow, but yes, we are back to that schedule. We are also filling in dates for 6 months from now, 4 months from now, but not a lot. We are really focused on the Fall of ’24, and the Spring of ’25.

The first conference is in Seattle over Labor Day (Sept. 5-8), and that is WAA which is the booking and conference for the Western Arts Alliance (that highlights artists from across dance, theater, and music disciplines).

No doubt you are also preparing for APAP (The Association of Performing Arts Presenters Global Performing Arts Conference, January 12-16, 2024) in New York City?

Exactly. The main conference me and my team prioritize is APAP which is a national booking conference. It is less international. It is more North American which really is where I’ve put most of my energy in the last 10 years. It truly and deeply understands the performing rights market in North America.

The annual APAP conference is the world’s leading forum and marketplace for the performing arts. Based in Washington D.C., APAP has 1,600 organizational and individual members and serves more than 5,000 performing arts professionals every year. Its members range from large performing arts centers in major cities, outdoor festivals, and rural community-focused organizations to academic institutions, as well as artists, and artist managers in all forms of dance, music, and theater.

With COVID, you began working from home.

I did. It was a very tough decision. A few weeks into it, when all of the closures were happening, they gave up the CAMI Music offices. We had these beautiful offices in the middle of Times Square. I had a view of where the ball drops from my office. But the offices were very expensive. Non-essential. Luckily, we got out of the lease which was no easy feat. Since then, the entire CAMI Music team has been working remotely. I like it. I was also able to hire a West Coast agent who lives on the West Coast which sounds pretty smart, but we had never done that before. We’ve got employees in Europe. We’ve got employees in the Midwest. We are all spread out.

I’m talking to you from a big Colonial (house) in Western Massachusetts which my husband Jordy (Jordy Freed, dir. of Partner Marketing & Strategy, Brand & Business Development, Video & Sound Products, Sony Corporation of America), and I recently bought.

It’s a huge lifestyle change.

So you are out of Brooklyn.

For the time being. I lived in Brooklyn for 17 ½ years. During maternity leave, we began working out of our home here in Western Massachusetts which is incredible. It is huge. It has a big yard, and it has nature everywhere. But I’ve really begun to miss the city.

The goal is to save up a get a small studio (in Manhattan) because we are going to be in and out. I still have so much business in New York. That is where all of the shows are. A lot of my clients are there. It just makes more sense coming in and out of Western Massachusetts to have a small studio in Manhattan.

Where are you in Western Massachusetts?

We are in a really nice area called the Highlands in Holyoke. We are right next to East Hampton, and North Hampton. I have an aunt and a cousin in East Hampton.

The Highlands was first known as Manchester Grounds.

It is a beautiful neighborhood. We are within walking distance of the Connecticut River. It is really nice. There’s an Amtrak train station like four minutes away that takes us directly into Penn Station.

CAMI Music was based at 165 West 57th Street in New York City from 1959 to 2005, when it moved to 1790 Broadway, a 1912 building at the corner of 58th Street at Columbus Circle.

Do you miss CAMI Music’s Times Square office?

Yes and no. I miss feeling like I am at the center of the universe, and I also had a great view of Central Park. I don’t miss commuting in and out of Times Square twice a day. I was coming in from Brooklyn. It was an hour and a half from Park Slope. I would get off at Times Square, right there on Broadway. Or sometimes, I would get out at Bryant Park, and walk from there. The commute on the subways from Brooklyn to Times Square was not so bad. It was the one block that I had to walk from the subways to my offices in Times Square, navigating all of the tourists that were stopping, taking photos, and asking questions. That took an hour in itself.

My wife and I recently stayed at the New York Marriott Marquis on Broadway, and to walk out into Times Square was just overwhelming.

It really smacks you in the face.

After 9/11 New York City was a more hospitable city. but in the past two years, it has become grittier.

I know. I can feel it. And it has changed. It is not the city that I fell in love with. I definitely hear what you are saying.

A year ago, you hired an agent on the West Coast.

Yes, I have a West Coast agent Daren Fuster, and he is fabulous. What is unique about him, and the CAMI Music model, is that he actually lives on the West Coast.

Where is Daren based? 

Believe it or not, he’s in the Pacific North West in Oregon, just outside of Eugene.

Hiring an agent that lives on the West Coast is a first for CAMI Music.

Yeah, it’s a new school of thought. COVID was, of course, a terrible thing but one of the silver linings was how practical, and how helpful remote work can be. It is wonderful to have a West Coast agent on the West Coast that keeps the same hours. And Daren is great. He will drive, and see presenters. He will go skiing with presenters on weekends. That’s really cool.

CAMI Music also has personnel in the Midwest and Europe as well?

We had an agent who was living in Idaho, but now he’s spending his time between Idaho and Paris. That’s Adam Tilley. He is kind of bouncing around. He does a lot of work for us with our European-based artists. And then we have artist manager Javier Manzana, based in Valencia, Spain, who represents a lot of our conductors.

With much of the performing arts sector shuttered by COVID—as well as Columbia Artists Management (CAMI) closing down in 2020 after 90 years, and the buyout of another leading management agency, Opus 3 Artists, by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music the same year, what we witnessed was an overall restructuring of the American performing arts business.

Opus 3 Artists traces its roots to the pioneering role of the legendary impresario and artist manager Sol Hurok between the 1920s and 1970s. A successor organization, ICM Artists, was formed in 1976 as a sub-division of International Creative Management, and the company became independent again as Opus 3 Artists in 2006.

The shakeup actually started further back with the death of CAMI’s chairman and CEO Ronald Wilford in 2015. Following the death of “classical music’s biggest power broker,” there was the closure of Columbia Artist Management (CAMI), a giant in the performing arts business for 90 years.

Columbia Artist Management (CAMI) served an unsurpassed roster of top instrumentalists, conductors, opera singers, and other vocalists, orchestras, theatrical, musical attractions, and dance ensembles.

The agency worked with many of the greatest artists ever to perform on the concert stage, including sopranos Leontyne Price, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Renata Tebaldi; mezzo–soprano Risë Stevens; contralto Marian Anderson; tenors Jussi Björling, Mario Lanza, John McCormack, Lauritz Melchior, and Richard Tucker; bass–baritone George London; bass Paul Robeson; pianists Van Cliburn and Vladimir Horowitz; violinists Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin; cellist Mstislav Rostropovich; conductors Herbert von Karajan, Eugene Ormandy, Antal Dorati, and Otto Klemperer; composer–conductors Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Igor Stravinsky; and composer-conductor–pianists Sergei Prokofiev and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

As COVID deepened, it became clear that all talent agencies were going to have much-reduced income. So the question became, “What do we do?”

I couldn’t agree with you more. It was a very shocking time. With Ronald passing there was no one person to really fill that role. For example, there’s the board at CAMI Music which is run and owned in partnership between the president of CAMI Music Jean-Jacques Cesbron, and Ronald’s son Chris Wilford. I didn’t get to work with Ronald Wilford for very long, unfortunately, but what I learned from him, and I saw through working for him, I see very much in my boss Jean-Jacques Cesbron. I also think you see it in other leaders in the field like (former CAMI personnel) Tim Fox (now at AMP Worldwide) or Doug Sheldon (Sheldon Artists), people that have gone off, and taken different paths.

The Columbia Artists Management (CAMI) closure after 90 years was one of the most shocking, and disruptive moments in American, if not global entertainment.

It was an institution. For 90 years, and to go belly-up in the pandemic, it shook our business as a whole. I found out only 24 hours before it was announced. CAMI Music had spun off a year prior. In 2004, CAMI Music was a subsidiary of Columbia Artists, and a few years later we became completely autonomous. We were our own company but, of course, with the same board still run Chris Wilford. Chris is very hands-off with the company, and he understands the music business. He was a touring musician, and he is a wealth of music knowledge. He has always been a great supporter of me, and all of CAMI Music, and what we do.

It was really hard watching our former parent company go under. CAMI Music was special because we were a separate entity.  We are only 15 employees spread across the world. We are lean and mean and that saved us. Being international, being smaller, more boutique. My team is myself and four others.

Another industry-wide disruption happened in 2016 when CAMI’s Theatricals Department shut down. All the staff were let go, except its president Gary McAvay who had been at CAMI for over 40 years. He passed away in 2022 in New York City at 68. He had represented hundreds of titles and artists, including “Cats,” “Stomp,” “Chicago,” “Annie,” “Carousel,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Grease,” and “Starlight Express.”

Gary died last February right before I was to meet with him in Memphis for a production (“Memphis Jookin’: The Show”) that he had been instrumental in helping us create at CAMI Music. He is sorely missed. He was a powerhouse. When Columbia Artists (CAMI) went under, Gary came to CAMI Music as a partner, and he brought some of his projects over to us, including “STOMP,” “The Four Phantoms,” and “Piaf, No Regrets.” Me and my team of bookers represented those projects for only a short time, unfortunately. He became one of our producers for the production with Lil Buck, an incredible dancer based out of Memphis. We were set to go, and on the eve of production with our partner The Orpheum in Memphis last February, Gary passed away about a week before. So he never got to see that production that he worked on.

(“Memphis Jookin’: The Show” was conceived and choreographed in part by its star, renowned local dancer Charles “Lil Buck” Riley, recognized as a celebrated exponent and importer of what is known as “jookin,’” an outgrowth of the “gangsta walk” and “buckin'” street-dance styles that accompanied the rise of Memphis hip-hop in the 1990s. The production made its world premiere on Feb. 11, 2022, at The Orpheum in Memphis.)

“Memphis Jookin’” toured nationally.

There were two sold-out shows at Lincoln Center last February. We are currently touring “Memphis Jookin,’” but we are looking to do some bigger projects. Lil Buck is part of the CAMI Music family. We love him, and we will keep creating opportunities for him.

Even prior to COVID, the entire arts ecosystem had evolved far beyond recognition. Dates were once traditionally booked as part of a subscription series. That aspect of the business had largely disappeared. Also, for decades, PACs booked shows directly, often risking a loss that was usually underwritten by sponsorship or endowments. As those waned pre-COVID, PACs began doing more commercially viable shows and encouraging co-promotes.

From experiences with COVID-related uncertainties, and the cancellations of tours and shows, have new business templates evolved in booking performing arts tours?  

Absolutely, and they are still evolving day by day. When COVID hit, I always say I have never worked so hard to lose money in my life. It was exactly what you said. It was days and days of—I would never say canceled as you said—but we postponed shows. Every day, I’d wake up– and at CAMI where I’ve got a roster of 60 artists that I am directly responsible for touring anywhere from 5 to 50 dates a season—and I was postponing all day. And nobody really knew when it would end. It really became the manager’s job to stay positive, and to come up with some set of plans for postponement. Some were for a year. Some tours we postponed by 6 months.

Now we are seeing the result of those postponements, which is great. I have artists that have finished touring; some that are currently touring, and many of those dates were pre-pandemic.

With the bookings, it changed more because audiences behavior is changing. What we saw before the pandemic was a subscription model, where audience members were buying tickets long in advance, and were always showing up for shows. That is changing. We are not seeing advance ticket buyers the way that we did pre-pandemic. It is more like a commercial venue or a jazz club being walk up. Which is interesting, but it is harder to anticipate than what we are used to in the performing arts, fan-find subscription model.

What has also changed is the level of patronage for many PACs. When bringing in international orchestras and dance companies in past years PACs were able to assemble a high number of donors to cover costs, Much of that sponsorship has dried up.

Yeah, touring international orchestras has always been part of the lifeblood of the performing arts, and even before the pandemic one of the most difficult tours to accomplish logistically, Not CAMI Music tours, but just in the recent season we saw the Munich Orchestra tour canceled, and the Budapest Orchestra tour canceled.

A few months ago, I and my CAMI Music team finished touring the Ukrainian National Orchestra. It played everywhere from all over the country to the State Theatre in New Jersey, and Carnegie Hall in New York. It was subsidized, and we worked really hard to accomplish that.

But you are right, the donors that would put forth so much money to subsidize international orchestras are dwindling, and we are seeing fewer international orchestra series all over the country.

As well, the impact of PBS on the sector has greatly waned. At one point PBS was instrumental in breaking new stars well-suited to the performing rights sector. Today there don’t seem to be similar mediums or platforms that can create star vehicles in that world.

I disagree. This is something that I have been paying a lot of attention to lately, specifically in classical music. NPR, PBS, and competitions, those are what we used to look to in order to sign the new great classical star. I don’t believe that is true anymore. What I believe now is that you look at the digital streaming platforms, and you look to who is streaming Peaceful Piano. Classical music is being consumed. So who are the artists getting the most plays on playlists like (Spotify’s) Peaceful Piano?

One major difference between the performing arts world, and other sectors is that in pop, rock, country, and hip-hop, the goal of most artists is to be a big success; to be famous, if you like. That is many artists’ idea of what success is. But in the performing arts world, that is not necessarily what success is deemed to be. Success may be if the artist or a conductor is able to tour once or twice a year on their terms, and are able to perform and record the music that they want to, and collaborate with the people that they want to. That’s success on their terms. Many of them don’t seek or need major contracts or celebrity status.

So there’s different levels of career advancement being considered when you first meet with a potential client in the performing arts world to what their goals are.

Yeah, the definition of success, I couldn’t agree with you more. But it is different from artist to artist. How a conductor might define his or her success will be different from an instrumentalist, which will be different from an opera singer. So it is really different from artist to artist. Having initially studied classical music, and then going into rock and roll, and moving back into the performing arts, I understand that at the core of every discussion around the definition of success the guiding light is artistic integrity. Talking about your technique, your skill, what it means, what you can contribute to society, to communities, which I never felt was as a dominant a force in that regard in the pop and rock world. It was streaming numbers, major album deals, and music videos. That stuff matters. It definitely matters, and it plays a role in the performing arts, particularly with instrumentalists, but there is a lot more focus on artistic integrity and talent, and the hope that they will be defined and experienced through audiences.

Here’s another difference with performing arts. In general, the median age of emerging artists in pop, rock, country, and hip-hop skews far younger than the performing arts world, though there are instrumentalists and dancers of all ages as well. In other words, performers are viewed as being too old after reaching 30 in other genres. So there’s a contrast between the differences in ages with different goals.

Yes, we are trying to address that now. We want artists like violinist  Ray Chen who has quite a young following. You see that in the way that he will do competitions (with non-professionals) that play with him, (along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic) at the Hollywood Bowl. It will be all digital, and young people submit videos online.

Former child prodigy Ray Chen, the 34-year-old Taiwanese-Australian is renowned for his savvy use of social media in making classical music more accessible to young people and expanding the reach of the art form.

Similarly, pianist/composer Chad Lawson is hailed as a streaming star creating classical music for the Spotify generation.

That is exactly right. Chad Lawson is a perfect example. As a1 Universal Decca artist, his music cuts across classical and jazz charts. He recently had five songs in the Top 25, and that was across jazz and classical. And his music is being consumed by people aged 25 to 40. That is his key demographic. We are seeing a lot of his music being consumed Monday to Thursday nights. We think that it is college students listening to piano music while they are studying.

Leading up to the birth of your son Max being born on May 31^st, Chad’s music was a constant in your households.

Chad is an artist that I listen to. Not because he’s my client. but his music calms me down so much. This kid, yeah. My greatest hope is that he is going to be a percussionist like I was, but he will know music. That’s for sure.

Like so many I discovered Chad through Spotify.

I’m not surprised at all. (Streaming music) is creating a new consumer. If I am looking to see who I should find as a classical artist, I’m going to go to the record labels, and I am saying, “Who are your greatest streaming artists right now?” People are listening to classical music across Spotify, Apple Music, and all of the digital streaming platforms. Now what I am working intensely on trying to do is find a way to marry that streaming consumer with the live ticket buyer for performing arts centers. It is a very hard uphill battle, but that is the future. Getting someone to buy a ticket for an artist that starts by them listening to Spotify.

Streaming, and even more so, social networking, moves faster than word of mouth in the past. But you also have to look for a “sticky” factor with talent. Artists don’t mean anything commercially unless you are able to sell tickets to their performances.

I completely agree, and that is the tricky part. People, especially if they are independent, have gotten so used to media assets in the comfort of their own homes. Me included. I’m part of the problem. But there truly, truly is no replacement for live music. I remember right when the pandemic started, (American jazz keyboardist and composer) Chick Corea who I represented, was in our office, and nobody knew what was going to happen, and Chick Corea said, “Since the dawn of time one human has been entertaining another human. A cave man danced around the fire while other cavemen watched and clapped. That will never change. Humans will always entertain other humans.”

That moment has stuck with me, and I believe it. And I am working toward that goal every day.

You represented Chick until his passing in 2021.

I was with him and his wonderful wife Gayle when he performed at the 2020 Grammy Awards Premiere Ceremony with his Spanish Heart Band and won for or Best Latin Jazz Album for “Antidote.”

You seem to represent disparate acts that might choose to play anywhere.

Pre-pandemic I represented guitarist Pablo Sainz Villegas. Years ago, he did a concert on a floating stage on the Amazon River with Plácido Domingo. So you are right. There’s no cap on how crazy you can get with an instrumentalist in terms of where they can perform. I also represent ABT Studio Company (the American Ballet Theater & Studio Company), and they have certain requirements. They need a stage. They need wing space. But we still find ways to do outdoor shows with them.

What are the challenges touring soloists like pianist Chad Lawson or organist Cameron Carpenter, as opposed to a full company? Are there different challenges involved?

Sort of. It is easier to tour a soloist. It’s interesting that you bring up Cameron Carpenter because he’s arguably one of the great exceptions to that rule, simply because he is so specific to what he plays, which is a pipe organ. For years, we had to tour a pipe organ which was his own design, and the only one of its kind. It was like a rock and roll load-in with two full semi trucks, 88 speakers, and 8 sub-woofers. It was incredible. We toured it all over the country, all over the world.

A dance company like the Cirque company (Cirque FLIP Fabrique), needs to be routed to tour to make it financially possible, and successful which means you are not just selling an artist, and the idea to a venue. You are also selling the timing and a specific date. It’s two-fold. It has to be routed throughout the country with a perfectly traveled schedule.

Whereas a pianist like Chad Lawson, I can’t book him in Berlin, to fly out there and then fly home. Does he like to do that? No. I block the time so he can maximize his time in different parts of the world. Recently, he performed at the Royal Albert Hall (in London), and then he went to Amsterdam, and next he went to Berlin and Cologne. Then he was able to go on Spring Break with his kids.

Solo conductors are much easier to tour than big, big companies that have buses and trucks that you have to keep on the road, and you have to clump it  (dates) together in the right way.

You have worked with the great Spanish flamenco dancer Farruquito, heir to one of the most renowned gypsy flamenco dynasties in Spain. He served three years in prison for manslaughter for a traffic accident, and he had some difficulty in obtaining a U.S. work visa.

That’s an interesting relationship. It is a partnership between CAMI Music and IMG, which are competing agencies. But his manager is a friend, so we have used the CAMI Music booking team, my team, to do his last several tours.

Canadian composer/conductor Howard Shore is a natural client for you given his stint as the original musical director of “Saturday Night Live” (from 1975-1980) and being the composer of the scores of “The Lord of the Rings,” and “The Hobbit” film trilogies. In addition to his three Academy Awards, Howard has also won three Golden Globe Awards and four Grammy. Awards.

Oh, he is incredible. And working with him is very full circle. I booked “The Music of Howard Shore” at Symphony Hall in Boston, and Howard has deep connections to Boston, of course. So we were sitting there having a coffee or a drink or something, and I got to tell him, “Howard, when I worked at ‘Saturday Night Live,’ there was a little picture of you taped above my desk that nobody had moved since the start of ‘Saturday Night Live.’ And it was like this temple to you. Everyone would look at it, and I stared at it every day. Now here we are, you are doing the music of ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ and we are having a brew in Boston which is really cool.”

I knew him when he was in the Toronto band Lighthouse in the late ‘60s.

Yeah, yeah. Well, he’s still chugging along. We are doing “Lord of the Rings” projects all over the world. We just did “Lord of the Rings” at Tanglewood.

Howard has been fighting unauthorized “Lord of the Rings” presentations in Europe and Ireland. He has taken legal action to prevent similar unofficial concerts in the future.

Yes, he put out a pretty adamant statement about it, and we are working on it.

A statement posted on Howard Shore’s official website reads: “We feel it is necessary to alert fans and followers of The Lord of the Rings in Concert that there are a number of concerts that have no association with Howard Shore in the UK and Germany being billed as “Der Herr der Ringe und der Hobbit” or “The Music of The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit” produced by Star Entertainment.

“Please be warned, Howard Shore has nothing to do with these concerts. There is a current lawsuit in process to have the concerts stopped. The music that is being played is assembled from unauthorized… arrangements and not at the standard of quality insisted upon by Howard Shore.”

Will Sir James Galway (popularly known as, “The man with the golden flute) tour again? He is now 83. He and his wife, American-born flutist Lady Jeanne Galway, keep quite busy inMeggen, Switzerland with The Galway Flute Academy with daily master classes, weekend residencies, and 10-day flute festivals.

I think if it was up to him he never would have stopped touring (due to COVID restrictions), and he would still be touring. His last date was in New York with Lizzo at the 2023 Met Gala (April 30th). He definably will be back. We are talking about some ideas. He called me recently. His last big tour was his 80^th birthday celebration tour. He toured all over the country, everywhere from West Palm Beach to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and his last date of the tour was right before the (air) flights began to shut down for the pandemic. He made it through a national tour, and it was great, On every single , the venues sent these huge cakes for his 80^th birthday celebration. He has a gorgeous home with his wife Jeanne Galway in Switzerland, and from there they run their flute academy which takes up a lot of his time. But he does want to tour. He’s ready to hit the road again.

As multi-tasker you also work with celebrated dance companies, theatrical productions, orchestras, and conductors.

Yeah, it is so funny because I definitely am not an expert on anything, but I know just enough about every genre in the performing arts. I love that term “performing arts” because it can really mean anything, and we show that in our roster. We recently produced an immersive show, “Monet’s Garden” (that ran November 1, 2022 – April 16, 2023, in downtown Manhattan). It had been exhibited by its head producer, and our partner, Nepomuk Schessl, long before New York, all over Europe.

I just missed the show when I was in New York in June.

Oh no. We extended it three times because sales were so strong. it was in the oddest on Wall Street in the Seamen’s Bank Building (at 30 Wall St. between Nassau St. and William St.). Last summer, I spent several sweaty weekends running around New York City, going into abandoned buildings and spaces in Times Square, and the abandoned Manhattan Mall, looking for the right space. It was pretty tricky to go into some of these places, but we settled on Wall Street.

“Monet’s Garden”is 360-degree exhibition staged with state-of-the-art multimedia technology, which allows visitors to immerse themselves in the world and famous artworks of the French painter and founder of impressionist painting, Claude Monet.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful production. It really is. It is really beautiful.

So “Monet’s Garden” is still touring?

Correct. We are planning it for some cities which I’ll keep under wraps for now. Andreas and Nepomuk Schessl are amazing promoters for large art-scale shows. They brought us “Monet” for New York. So we, CAMI Music, produced it, and we are working now to help with ­­presenting it in more cities in the U.S., and globally.

Your role in performing artists today is far different from your earlier days working for photographer Danny Clinch’s Three on the Tree Productions which specialized in music documentaries, and music videos including with Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen, and Blind Melon.

It was incredible. It was always about music, and I learned so much. I was with Danny for years. It was a great time. I ended up being production savvy and it changed my life.

And you were having the time of your life.

I was. Yeah, it was an interesting trip for me. The world of Danny was a very different world from going to APAP wearing a badge around my neck. APAP was a new world to me with my rock and roll background

How did you land that job with Danny after working at “Saturday Night Live?”

The internship at “Saturday Night Live” was a game changer for me, but so was working for Danny. He really took a risk with me. He knew that I had a music background, but I didn’t know much about film. I was recommended by someone at SNL. Danny had a wildly successful photo studio, but when I met him, he was starting up his film studio. That was the time that Pearl Jam had filmed their documentary (“Immagine in Cornice” in 2007) in Italy, and they needed someone for digital imaging. Of course, I had no idea what that meant, but I knew that I would figure it out.

Of course, I did.

We also shot a documentary in 2011 with My Morning Jacket, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band called “Live at Preservation Hall: Louisiana Fairytale.”

I recall My Morning Jacket and New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band touring together. MMJ’s frontman Jim James had earlier collaborated with the jazz group on a pair of tracks for a 2010 compilation, “Preservation: An Album to Benefit Preservation Hall & the Preservation Hall Music Outreach Program,” that also included their link-ups with Tom Waits, Merle Haggard, Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell, Ani DeFranco, Pete Seeger, and others.

I got to work with Ben Jaffe (the creative director of Preservation Hall who plays tuba and double bass with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band), and all of the guys in Preservation Hall Jazz Band, I felt a deep connection to the way that they spoke about jazz; the way they spoke about history; the way that they felt about their contributions; and the meaning of their music, and the entertainment that they create. It made me really miss the art which is where I started as a classical percussionist.

How long did you intern at “Saturday Night Live?”

It was about a semester. I would have loved to have stayed on. I was lucky to be offered a position to come back after the semester as an employee, but I decided to finish college which, of course, I’m very glad that I did.

You had been at university before coming to New York?

Yeah, I went to a small conservatory in Columbus, Ohio, the Capital University Conservatory of Music.

There you studied music business and percussion.

Yeah, I was a percussionist. I was in the percussionist group playing drums.

You didn’t graduate. You came to New York.

Yeah. When I moved to New York, I had just turned 21. I rode in with a broken-down car with my boxes of things. I found a hotel in Brooklyn that let me put three months’ rent across four credit cards, and I got a job waiting tables on the off weeks from SNL. So I started working for “Saturday Night Live” just having turned 21 from Columbus, Ohio. It was quite a time for me.

You then returned to Columbus to graduate?

Yes. I was in a music business program, and my professor was wildly supportive for me taking a semester off and going to “Saturday Night Live.” So I came back to school. By that point, I was sold on New York. So I did something very, very hard which was graduating conservatory early. There’s no music program out there that is easy. They are all very intense. They are all very difficult. And they are all very expensive. I put myself through school, working several jobs. But I had so much support from my professor to graduate early with work-study programs. Then I just high-tailed it back to New York, and I started working for Danny.

You aren’t originally from Ohio.

I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico then my mom who was pretty young, took me to Columbus where I lived with my grandmother, my mother and my great-grandmother for years. Then we moved around Ohio and then I went to college and then I got to New York. So yeah, I grew up in Columbus, Ohio.

And that’s pretty redneck.

And it wasn’t the nice part. So yeah.

You joined CAMI Music as a regional booking agent in August 2011.

I did. It’s so funny because I had no idea about what the business of the performing arts was.

C’mon over to the dark arts.

(Laughing) I loved working with Danny, but the business was changing. I wasn’t on the photo side, I was on the film side, and money for music videos and music documentaries was drying up. So I just started meeting everybody. I met publicists. I met label executives.

Then you met with CAMI Music.

I will never forget that. I literally sat in Ronald Wilford’s office, and I said, “I love what you do. It is very interesting to me, but I have never done this before.” I had no idea if this was going to work out. Jean-Jacques Cesbronn said, “Well, I’ve got a good feeling about you. You are hired.”

And that was 11 years ago.

What was the first project you worked on at CAMI Music?

The first artist I really directly became involved with creatively was the dancer Savion Glover.

The rock star of the tap. One none of the best tap dancers America has ever produced.

I’ll bet you don’t know that Savion’s grandmother Anna Lundy Lewis, who first noticed his musical talent, was the minister of music at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark where Whitney Houston was a choir girl. As was her music celebrity cousins, Dee Dee and Dionne Warwick previously. Whitney’s celebrated singing mother Cissy Houston is a lifelong active member of the congregation, and for more than 50 years, she has led the 200-member Youth Inspirational Choir at the church.

Oh my. All the years that I worked with Savion I didn’t know that. It’s so funny that never came up. Another fun fact about Savion is that I met my husband Jordy, then a jazz publicist for DL Media, at a Savion show when I was with Savion at The Blue Note in New York 11 years ago.

You almost immediately connected with Savion because the two of you discovered that you shared several points of mutual interest.

We found a connection because he considered himself a percussionist more than a dancer. So we really understood each other on that level. He was very, very attached to the world of jazz, and so was I. He wanted to do well as I did because I didn’t come from anything except waiting tables and learning from my mom who sold used cars. In the performing arts the word, “sales” is still sort of an ugly word, but I have never shied away from it. I love making money for my artists; whether it’s selling the right contract deal or selling the right production, I am always happy to do it. Savion really got excited with that approach. And it worked out really well. We did a show called “STePz” that toured all over the country. We did a holiday show. It was awesome.

I have found over the years that few performers know or understand the inner business machinations of entertainment. Nor do they often care to know.  At one time, an artist in any genre might proclaim, “I record my music. and I tour. That’s what I do.”

They might then be told, “Well, we need you for some marketing, and do some interviews.”

They’d say, “Okay, I’ll do that.”

Now a performer has to be aware of so many different parts of their career. Things that labels and music publishers used to take care of, but don’t now do due to consolidations and eventual downsizing.

I couldn’t agree with you more. This might sound radical, but I believe it is actually criminal that students, even to this day with the amount of money that they are spending on music degrees, and they are not being given the tools they need to find a certain level of business success for themselves.

Performers must now be aware of the workings of recording, video and podcast production, bookings, live events, music publishing, social media, marketing, radio, and film and television production.

Yeah, it’s incredibly challenging, and I hope to be proven wrong in this but from what I see since graduating from a conservatory of music is that these educational institutions are not doing their job, and I think that it really hurts our ability to hire workers sometimes. You don’t study the performing arts if you are poor. You do it because you had piano lessons growing up, and you got to go to concerts.

Creatives, and not just their managers, must understand that they must learn the business. It’s like operating a small retail store. They need to know the costs and the avenues of distribution for what they are selling.

What about Black Box royalty payments in which unmatched royalties are distributed on a market share basis to music publishers or to those songwriters that do not have an exclusion clause in their contracts.

Or checking on the status of orphan works whose owners are hard or impossible to identify or locate?

Both cause the creator, writer, or artist to lose money, and not receive the proper monetary credit that their music has generated.

I’ll tell you right now that they are not being taught any of that. I speak at everything from the Lang Lang Foundation to my alma mater, the graduation class at Capital University Conservatory of Music, and I feel that schools hate me because I am mostly saying, “You are not learning everything that you need to learn. Study the business.” I’ll tell you when I find an artist at this level, at a CAMI Music level, they have to be able to advance their career for me to even consider them. And they are not being given those tools. They just can’t be instrumentalists anymore. They just can’t be dancers anymore. They have to be their own publicist. They have to be their own social media director.

Many entertainers say they don’t want to get involved with the business side of music but that’s how they get sandbagged in their careers.  By misjudging, and misunderstanding management, music publishing, and recording contracts.

I tell performers to check out Todd and Jeff Brabec’s essential industry legal guide, “Music Money And Success: The Insider’s Guide to Making Money in the Music Business,” and Donald Passman’s “All You Need To Know About The Music Business.” Both books break down music industry information to very basic, easy-to-understand forms.

I feel like the more I learn, and the more I do this, the more that I don’t know.

Two decades ago clients or venue owners wouldn’t likely call you after hours. And certainly not on weekends. Working today, even from home, you have to be available almost 24/7.

It is really challenging. It is really, really changeling, especially because I have business that is happening all over the world. So I wake up at 7 A.M. to a barrage of texts and emails from Europe, and then I stay up late at night dealing with Asia. In the middle of it, I’ve got American hours. It’s a challenge, and it is something that I definitely feel that I am a part of the problem.

Working directly with artists in the past as a manager and music publisher, I had early morning hours calls from the UK when a client was locked out of a hotel room, and when a club refused to pay them.

So you know. It’s very stressful for myself and my entire team. I wish I knew a solution.

How do you plan holidays?

I just do. I take holidays. It just means I don’t jump on a Zoom when I’m on vacation. My favorite hobby is scuba diving. I tell my clients, “You are never more out of office than when you are 100 feet below the ocean’s surface.” That is when I’m out of touch.

Where do you and Jordy scuba?

We scuba mostly in a small island off of Honduras called Roatán (65 km. off the northern coast of Honduras, located between the islands of Utila and Guanaja). It is the second-largest barrier reef in the world. It is the best place in the world. We have made so many great friends in Roatán. The ocean, the coral, and the life there is incredible. The locals are incredible. We were on a dive boat several miles off the coast of Roatán when we first heard the word COVID. We were able to fly home, and then the world shut down a week later.

In Dec 2015, you survived a three-story apartment fire which erupted around 1:35 A.M. at 30 Richardson Street in Williamsburg, a block from McCarren Park. The fire quickly grew to a five-alarm blaze as about 200 firefighters rushed to put out the flames for nearly three hours. A man and a woman were killed. Firefighters found the male victim hours after finding the woman on the second floor.

You were inside your third-floor apartment when you woke to the sound of shattering windows in your kitchen. You were wearing a sleep mask and

you had earplugs in too, but you also heard your neighbor banging on the door and screaming. So you got down on the floor below the smoke and crawled over to the door.

Afterward, many of your artists and colleagues supported you because you lost everything. How do you survive that, and go on? That’s a tough one.

It is tough. It was really hard. I lost literally everything. I crawled out in the clothes that I was sleeping in. Everything was destroyed. This included an entire wall of photographs from my time at “Saturday Night Live.” All of the signed “Thank you Theresa” notes from Neil Young, and Sheryl Crow. All of the sheet music that I wrote in college. A snare drum that I had built myself. My grandmother’s engagement ring. It was really hard, but I had a slightly challenging childhood so I knew what it felt like to not feel safe in my home. So I had already developed the tools to deal with that, and I had my community of friends in Brooklyn, thank goodness. Also, the performing arts industry rallied around me.

Your clients and others supported a GoFundMe site on your behalf.

It was crazy. I’ve always said that if I was still working in rock and roll, I probably never would have gotten that kind of community support. Larry, it was really funny. For the first four months after the fire, every piece of clothing I wore was some kind of performing arts T-shirt. People were just sending me swag for months and months.

Here it is seven years later, and you are married with a new baby while living and working from a beautiful Colonial house in Western Massachusetts.

A mother and working lady with it all.

I’m supposed to make my first international trip in a couple of months. (Laughing) Oh my gosh, I don’t know how I am going to manage it.

Larry LeBlanc is widely recognized as one of the leading music industry journalists in the world. Before joining CelebrityAccess in 2008 as senior editor, he was the Canadian bureau chief of Billboard from 1991-2007 and Canadian editor of Record World from 1970-80. He was also a co-founder of the late Canadian music trade, The Record.

He has been quoted on music industry issues in hundreds of publications including Time, Forbes, and the London Times. He is co-author of the book “Music From Far And Wide,” and a Lifetime Member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

He is the recipient of the 2013 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, recognizing individuals who have made an impact on the Canadian music industry.

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The Honorable Pascale St-Onge becomes minister of Canadian heritage.

St-Onge, who was elected to represent the riding of Brome—Missisquoi in the House of Commons of Canada in the 2021 Canadian federal election, had previously served as Minister of Sport and Minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec.

In a statement Erin Benjamin, President & CEO of the Canadian Live Music Association (CLMA) welcomed the new minister

“The economic and cultural value of live music in Canada is enormous,” Benjamin said “but our industry’s true potential can only be fully realized through policy and investment that embraces live music entrepreneurs as stakeholders by leveraging their direct impact on an artist’s ability to succeed. We are eager work with the Minister in the weeks and months ahead, to harness live music activity and its unique ability to drive job creation, economic impact, tourism development, city brand building and artistic growth from coast to coast to coast.”

Over the past decade, Minister St-Onge served as Secretary General then President of the Fédération nationale des communications et de la culture, where she worked to address the challenges facing the media, newspapers, and the cultural sector. In this role, she oversaw expert studies aimed at developing public policies, participated in the creation and adoption of programs to support the print media, and contributed to the implementation of policies and programs designed to help the media and cultural sectors adapt to shifts brought about by digital platforms. In addition, she was instrumental in the purchase of the Groupe Capitales Médias and its transformation into a cooperative that allowed its daily newspapers to survive and continue their mission.

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Steve Martin is revered in the global live music sphere.

Consistently over nearly five decades with the most genre-bending artist rosters of any North American agent, he may well be one of the shrewdest talent agents in the sector with clients renowned for helping redefine contemporary music.

In 2021, Martin and fellow booking veteran Andy Somers launched Paladin Artists, an independent talent and literary agency that was strengthened with strategic partnership alliances with Wayne Forte of Entourage Talent Associates, and Karrie Goldberg of The Kagency.

Focusing on music touring, live events as well as theatrical and literary representation, Paladin Artists has offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London.

Martin got his professional start in music in 1979 with New York concert promoter New Audiences which booked Muddy Waters, Tom Waits, Dire Straits, Weather Report, and Miles Davis in New York, Boston, and Washington.

He then briefly worked as an agent at Magna Artists in New York in 1982 before starting his own independent Manhattan shop, The Music Business Agency (MBA).

While American booking agencies mostly balked at booking at what they considered niche acts in the ‘70s, Martin established a different business model with MBA signing Billy Bragg, Jimmy Cliff, Fela, Yellowman, Toots, and the Maytals, author Robert Hunter, Jorma Kaukonen, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and Hot Tuna.

He operated MBA for 7 years before selling to the William Morris Agency (WMA) in 1989 and becoming one of WMA’s principal booking agents.

He left William Morris in 1994 to spearhead the fledgling New York office for the UK-based The Agency Group as president of its  North American operations.

In 2013, Martin became VP, World Wide Concerts at APA Talent and Literary Agency, working alongside Bruce Solar and Steve Lassiter, after being named partner in 2015.

Veteran agent Andy Somers founded Bandwagon in 1984, and repped artists such as the Circle Jerks, Megadeth, and many others. He reopened Bandwagon in 1998. He also worked at Frontier Booking International in 1987, Triad Artists in 1990, ICM in 1992, The Agency Group in 2000, becoming a senior VP, co-helming its Los Angeles operation, leaving just prior to the company being acquired by United Talent Agency in 2015; and then joined the APA Agency as president of concerts in 2014.

Paladin Artists’ valued team also includes: Dave Kaplan, Chyna Chuan-Farrell, Seth Rappaport, Steve Ferguson, Kath Buckell, Sara Schilevert, Brandon Zmigrocki, Winston C. Simone, Kath Buckell James Bauman, Christian Ellett, Andy Howie Gold, and Katie Gamelli who leads the company’s Theatrical Literary division.

Martin’s personal roster consists of Billy Bragg, BLKBOK, Crash Test Dummies, Bruce Cockburn, Chris Difford, David Gilmour, Rick Wakeman, Robert Fripp, King Crimson, Surfbort, Buster Poindexter / David Johansen, Dream Theater, Hot Tuna, Janis Ian, Jools Holland / Jools Holland and His Rhythm & Blues Orchestra, Jorma Kaukonen, Kiefer Sutherland, Lewis Watson (shared with Steve Ferguson) Loreena McKennitt, Porcupine Tree, Ray Davies, Little Steven & the Disciples of Soul, The Bizarre World of Frank Zappa, and The Estate of Robert Hunter.

In the face of the global touring business contracting and consolidating, as well as agencies increasingly seeking to offer clients ancillary services, you are working alongside people who have gone through similar multi-layered business situations. You have worked in specific different genres for years, but others at Paladin Artists have done so as well.  

We definitely have. Somebody was asking me about the company, and I said that it is a combination of  Seal Team Six and The Bad News Bears. That is who we are here. It is Andy, Wayne, Karrie, and I with a lot of young scrappy, energetic people who don’t know how to fail, and we are going to show them how not to fail.

There’s a wealth of talented staff and headliners at Paladin Artists, but it is essentially a boutique-styled agency on steroids.

We aren’t for everybody, and everybody is not for us. We do a very specific job incredibly well, and that is how we look at it. We want to be Tiffany’s, not Kmart.

Paradigm Talent Agency’s delivered a shock wave to the industry with its mid-March 2020 layoffs followed by the unprecedented shutdown/postponement of live entertainment that followed, and then as Paradigm severed its music operation, the American agency world was blown apart.

Among the newly formed agencies that emerged following this eruption of changes in the talent world were: Reliant Talent Agency TBA, MINT Talent, Arrival Artists, the Golden Gate Talent Agency, and Wasserman Music—with many involving agents previously with WME, CAA, and Paradigm Talent Agency.

We have many friends at all of these indie agencies, We want all of them to succeed. I’m rooting for them all. The more the merrier. There’s also Madison House, and High Road (Touring). I want everybody to do well.

Of course, you and Andy Somers both left APA and launched Paladin Artists in 2021. Then you quickly made strategic partnerships with Wayne Forte’s Entourage Talent Associates, and The Kagency, founded by Karrie Goldberg.

You ultimately work in a very small industry with a lot of big personalities, and I think you and Andy are naturally drawn to people that do business in a similar way. It’s sort of like. “We’ve all been struggling in this COVID world for 18 months, why don’t we work with people that we want to really work with? People that we respect  and have similar visions as us.”

Is that what it really came down to in bringing Entourage Talent, and The Kagency into the fold?

You just summed it up. We don’t have to do the rest of the interview. You just very articulately, and simply said exactly what we are doing.

At the time of the pair of linkup, Andy Somers said, “Paladin, Entourage, and The Kagency share similar visions, and will each benefit by the sharing of information, experiences, and common goals; exploring new means of improving the future of artist and brand representation while remaining independent at a controllable scale of operation.”

Entourage Talent was established by Wayne Forte in 1993 as a boutique-styled international booking, talent agency, and consulting firm. Previously, Forte was a founding partner, president, and CEO of International Talent Group, (ITG).

Among Entourage Talent’s clients are Tedeschi Trucks Band, Joe Satriani. and Steve Hackett.

The Kagency, founded by Karrie Goldberg in 2004, is one of the first venue representation businesses in North America. It includes project management, talent representation, event-related media buying, and project consulting. It manages event, film, and photo shoot bookings for a portfolio of 500+ traditional and non-traditional venues in the U.S. and the UK. This includes retail pop-up locations, photography studios, restaurants, nightclubs, galleries, penthouses, and outdoor spaces – as well as – talent bookings. Its roster of clients has included Nike, Givenchy, Cartier, Under Armour, Maserati and Vogue as well as such talent as Duran Duran, and Beyoncé.)

The role of a talent agency has unquestionably evolved. At one time agencies soothed clients about their careers or took their fees and moved on. Today, it’s focused on music touring, live events, theater, literary representation, and touring exhibitions while managers seek to establish careers for their clients that will go on for years.

I think as the big talent agencies somewhat imploded what emerged from the ashes are more entrepreneurial independent agencies. A manager may not have the tools to do all of those career matters, but those tools are more readily available now to a talent agency like Paladin Artists.

Yes, and that is either something that you are kind of born with or you are not. There are still people working at larger corporations. I don’t care if it’s CAA or IBM. People find comfort in those institutions, and that’s fine. They are institutions that exist for a reason, and they are good institutions, and I tip my hat to them. But that is not where we aim to be. We want to be an independent agency. We look forward to exploring some other areas. We have a theatre and literary person, Katie Gamelli, who is doing wonderfully. And we have a diverse roster, and it is really the younger acts that are very exciting, and also the classic clients who we lall ove that I have been representing for 20, 30 or 40 years. They still have an audience and still enjoy playing.

What Paladin Artists is doing in focusing on different cultural opportunities isn’t all that different from Wasserman although they work on a grander scale.

They have a lot of money.

Still, Wasserman is also filled with independent,entrepreneurial agents and management executives like Paladin Artists.

That’s very true.

You mentioned bringing in Katie Gamelli to lead the company’s Theatrical Literary division.

Katie Gamelli spent the last 9 years working in the literary division of A3 Artists Agency, and was named by the Broadway Women’s Fund as one of the 2020 Women to Watch on Broadway, She has also worked for The Kleban Foundation, and taught master classes at Sewanee Writers Conference, the Yale School of Drama, and Montclair State University.

Her talent roster of playwrights, composers, lyricists, directors, and designers includes Shakina Nayfack, Daniel Alexander Jones, Carson Kreitzer, and the Estate of Maria Irene Fornés.

Katie’s role at Paladin Artists, in essence, is to discover where the points of intersection lie between the theatrical and music worlds—to look at artists and evaluate the opportunities available to them in the theatrical and literary worlds–and to funnel opportunities between both sectors, while continuing to grow the company’s overall roster.

Well, it’s interesting because Katie has been working in Broadway, and she has a great eye for looking at the roster, and seeing what could evolve legitimately. As you know, it’s a tricky business, whether it’s Off Off Broadway or Off Broadway or Broadway.

Talk to our mutual friend Michael Cohl, founder and chairman, S2BN Entertainment, about the intricacies of Broadway.

(Laughing) Don’t get me started on Michael Cohl and Broadway.

With a track record unmatched by any impresario in entertainment history, Michael Cohl may well also be Broadway’s biggest gambler, ever. He co-produced Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Bombay Dreams,”  and was involved with the Monty Python musical “Spamalot” in New York. He salvaged “Spider-Man” from a premature death when money ran out. He scuttled a “Jesus Christ Superstar” tour, which was to star Johnny Rotten. He was a co-producer of “Bat Out Of Hell,” one of the lead producers of both the jukebox musical “Rock of Ages,” and Asi Wind’s magic show “Inner Circle.” Cohl is also a co-owner of the Big Apple Circus with Arny Granat and Nik Wallenda of the famous Wallenda family highwire act.

Theatre is a tricky terrain but one of your clients is Canadian actor Kiefer Sutherland who is well-versed in theatre and TV as well. 

There are Broadway stories I could tell you.

The one thing that we have which is a hit right now Off-Broadway is “David Blaine Presents Asi Wind’s Inner Circle” and my associate Winston Simone works on it. As the guy who represented (celebrity magician and magic historian) Ricky Jay for 15 years, I can say that Asi is truly in the one percent.

I’m certainly aware of late Ricky Jay and his extraordinary work as both a historian and practitioner of illusions and cons. I know him also from his film appearances including “House of Games” (1987), “Boogie Nights” (1997), and the James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997).

The “Asi Wind’s Inner Circle” show opened in September, and the show immediately clicked in, and it has become a hot ticket in a small theater (The Judson Theatre at Washington Square South) where we are selling out 7 shows a week right now. And that’s fun.

After its launch, Paladin Artists soon recruited a number of veteran talent agents including Dave Kaplan who brought with him 20 clients including high fliers Spacey Jane, the Black Angels, Gary Numan, the Kills, Melody’s Echo Chamber, and Allah-Las.

With more than two decades in American live music, Dave Kaplan got his start as a concert promoter and talent buyer in San Francisco before launching his own booking agency, Easy Action Industries which merged with The Agency Group in 2002. There, he served 13 years including as VP of its New York office. He left TAG in 2015 just weeks after it was confirmed that the company had been acquired by United Talent Artists (UTA). He also had a tenure at Paradigm where he spent 5 years in the music department before moving to ICM Partners in 2020.

Dave has known and worked with you and  Andy for over 20 years.

We were together at The Agency Group. He had a little club band called the White Stripes. Dave has great instincts on signings. and he’s really a good complement to Brandon (Zmigrocki) who you probably don’t know. He was at Dynamic Talent, and at ICM and CAA before that. CAA as an assistant and ICM as an agent

Brandon brought his roster including Anti-Flag, the Chats, Squeaky Jane and Thick.

Yes.

Prior to Dynamic Talent where he was VP of Live Talent,  Brandon Zmigrocki was a territory agent at ICM Partners which he joined in 2013. While there, he oversaw the relaunch of Sinead O’Connor and developed Yuna, and the Chats. And he represented John Hiatt. Zmigrocki began his career in CAA’s Music Department, working his way up to Agent Trainee and Department Coordinator. Prior to ICM, he was the National Ticket Coordinator for AEG Live/Concerts West, working on tours including the Rolling Stones, Bruno Mars, and Enrique Iglesias.

With Brandon and Dave, I was really hoping that we could get them at a similar time because they work both ends of the spectrum in indie rock. Brandon has a lot of young up-and-coming bands; some that are starting to break like the Chats. And Dave has the Black Lips, the Black Angels, and a hot band out of Australia (formed in Fremantle in 2016), Squeaky Jane.

We have two Janes on the roster.

Brandon handles Squeaky Jane, and Dave Kaplan books Spacey Jane.

I know. It’s a lot of Janes.

Are Dave and Brandon your youngest staff members?

No Winston C. Simone would be. He’s in his mid-20s. Sara Schlievert is also a young agent. She has a hot young band called Yam Haus, and she works with me on Crash Test Dummies. Winston, working with Sara Schlievert, handles BLKBOK which we are very excited about. He’s a young classical pianist and composer (born and raised in Detroit’s inner-city with a name that echoes of one of the greatest pianists and composers of all time, Johann Sebastian Bach) in his late 20s or early 30s. And this is where Katie (Gamelli) looped back in conversation with The Pubic Theatre about BLKBOK doing a show (on Apr 28th, 2023). He is phenomenal. The New York Times gave him a review that we can’t buy. His manager Benton James said that “Nobody knew that they had their favorite black poet, and then they saw Amanda Gorman, and if people see BLKBOK, everybody will have their favorite classical piano player.”

BLKBOK (aka Charles Wilson III) found his calling at age 6 while performing a Mozart sonata at a piano recital in his hometown of Detroit. By the time he was 8, BLKBOK was an acclaimed piano prodigy, winning statewide accolades and college-level competitions. Since then, he has worked with Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, Demi Lovato, Cirque Du Soleil, John Mayer, and others. He is co-managed by Benton James, Billy Mann, Annie Balliro, and Dee Dee Kearny.

BLKBOK – Michelle’s First Day At The White House

As Donna Lee Davidson wrote in the New York Times (June 30th, 2022) about “Black Book DLUX,” an expansion of BLKBOK’s debut album: “BLKBOK, the artist alias of Charles Wilson III, calls his music Neo-Classical, “but maybe call it characteristic classical: classical playing in articulation, embellishments, and style, but not classical in obligation. His music points directly to great composers — this album nods to Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and the waltz king, Chopin — but characterizes differently the look and feel of the institutions that contain them.

This recent release—-features poetry by Lauren Delapenha, spoken interludes that, woven with pianos, evoke dreams or memories turned into hard-to-bear realities. “(Poem) Cookie Waltz” narrates a Sunday afternoon dance between Wilson and his mother, who tells him that if he ‘danced real good, Mozart might show up.’ Although this is the only track titled as a waltz, most of the album evokes the style. ‘I Made Her Breakfast’ is looser than the dance with Cookie: melancholic, sometimes merely a triple-metered canvas for monochromatic painting.

Delapenha’s diction has sharp edges, cutting staccato phrases in ‘(Poem) The Hustle Is Real,’ in which she narrates a chaotic day with the speed of Busta Rhymes, a childhood favorite of Wilson’s. The piano chases her words, not just with fast notes, but also with scurrying embellishments surrounding a melody’s five descending notes. The pace eases into a moon-gazing stillness: Bach in his left hand, Debussy in his right.”)

You have kept the agency structure fairly lean with about 14 or 15 agents.

That’s not including Wayne and Karrie’s staff. Karrie is kind of one of our secret weapons. She’s in England. I’m sure you’ve read some of the press on the Outernet Live (the state-of-the-art, 25,000-square-foot, 2,000-capacity venue on Charing Cross Road, managed by Robert Buttersm and Karrie, founders of Green Light Development) that recently opened in London. It’s her project. It took a lot of time, and effort to launch that very successfully Most of her staff are here in our (New York) office. They work on really interesting things, putting projects into interesting spaces. The Basquiat Exhibit was theirs, for instance, here in New York.

While Paladin has an exceptional roster of heritage acts you have broadened the lineup with other opportunities to service an expanded roster for artists developing over the next decade.

That’s what we are hoping. Frankly, that playbook worked at The Agency Group. The Agency Group was very good in developing new bands. We have the same philosophy by having the classic rock artists that we really respect, and love that don’t get a lot of love at other companies necessarily because they aren’t in hip hop. Just like a baseball team, you hope that the veterans stay veteran, and you hope that some of the young rookies get hot in a couple of years. It’s the same.

A long-standing complaint of young agents coming into music has been about facing obstacles impeding them from developing newer acts, especially while breaking new genres of music.

Major American talent agencies passed over hip hop and rap acts for years much as they had done earlier with R&B-based music acts.

Earlier, older American talent agencies like the William Morris Agency (WMA) had no truck with rock and roll in the late ‘60s, and early ‘70s. Their attitude was, “See the Jeff Beck Group? Are you crazy? Liza Minnelli is opening downtown.”

That’s very funny. Then Premier Talent Agency’s Frank Barsalona came along and started making a lot of money with those (UK rock) acts.

The late Barbara Skydel was alongside him as senior VP, the first female principal of a major talent firm.

Oh yes. She was a powerhouse. She deserved more credit than she got.

For the most part, contemporary national music bookings in America operated on a model devised by Premier Talent Agency’s Frank Barsalona in the ‘70s. Regional promoters had their territory and mostly worked major markets. Over time, a number of savvy promoters realized they could successfully work smaller markets as destination attractions.

You work with many heritage acts including Billy Bragg, Rick Wakeman, Crash Test Dummies, Bruce Cockburn, Ray Davies, Janis Ian, David Johansen, David Gilmour, Chris Difford, Jools Holland, Hot Tuna, and Robert Fripp.

Absolutely.

In most cases, these acts are not making money from their recording catalogs any longer. That income stream has slowed to a trickle. This is almost the last hurrah for some of the heritage acts out there touring

You are right. The calendar is not their friend.

Touring is one of the few ways many of these acts can bring in significant money, particularly after being off the road for nearly two years due to COVID, but also in what may be the sunset years of their careers. Also touring on their own, like Billy Bragg, and Rick Wakeman often do, they can do really quite well financially.

Yep. The two examples that you brought up are interesting because they are two of the few artists that are lucky enough to be able to perform solo or as a duo and still draw audiences, and get paid. Rick and Billy don’t have the other overhead that other bands do. However, King Crimson we had out two summers ago on what was implied to be a “Farewell Tour,” and that was postponed twice. And just as you were talking about with COVID, there were Canadian dates confirmed but the border was still closed.

There was uncertainty and we had to pull those dates back.

That tour was like an “Indiana Jones” movie. The Delta variant was just coming on, and in that band two guys can’t get sick. They can’t do it without Robert (Fripp) or Tony (Levin). If one person or two people go down for three days, the tour financially is upside down. Now they made it through every show. played with 22 people on the road, in spite of hurricanes in Florida, fires in California, and floods in the North East. It was like playing through Biblical times on that tour—are locusts next? with every show played. But it’s very fragile. The financial system is very fragile, even for American bands.

Not your clients but the YES line-up of guitarist Steve Howe, drummer Alan White, keyboardist Geoff Downes,  vocalist Jon Davison, and bassist Billy Sherwood, was recently forced to abandon a European and UK tour due to problems with acquiring insurance, but plan to return to the road in 2024.

Meanwhile, Rick Wakeman has announced “Return Of The Caped Crusader” live dates for 2024 In which he will perform a set that includes Yes classics and music from “Journey To The Centre Of The Earth,” his 1974 A&M album.

Well, we represented Jon Anderson, (Trevor) Rabin, and (Rick) Wakeman (ARW). The last time they performed it was pre-COVID. It was a more naive and optimistic time and not as fraught with danger. But it is a real problem with the current finances, and it applies to American bands too. For any touring artist, whether a ballroom theatre size or up, it is not unlike a promoter your profit is in that last week or the last two weeks of a tour. Like a promoter’s is in the last 20% of the house, and if you get three dates that go down in the middle of a tour, you are upside down financially.

It is impressive that the Crash Test Dummies were welcomed back last year with open arms in North America, the UK, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg following delays with touring due to COVID.  

Surprisingly, there has been renewed interest in the Dummies with younger generations discovering its 1991 debut album  “The Ghosts That Haunt Me” which led to its 30th Anniversary Tour.

The Crash Test Dummies are currently in a midst of an American run of dates with a career retrospective show with several Canadian dates after releasing a single “Sacred Alphabet” in March.

I saw the band recently in New York, and they were fantastic. It made me so happy. They were as good as they were in the ‘80s. and the audiences love them, their new material too. Brad (Roberts) has really become an amazing front man which was wonderful to see.

When will COVID be deemed absolutely over? The big question, eh?

That’s an interesting question. You look at the recent Bruce Springsteen tour and they kept as tight of a bubble as they could have.

With North American-based acts, if a member gets COVID, and the band is forced to cancel dates, the band can sit it out somewhere here or return home. For an international act, if that happens, the entire tour is jeopardized.

And with international acts, their visas only last so long.

Losing two or three shows on a tour could be a make-or-break proposition for a UK band.

Roger Daltrey recently told USA Today that the Who may not be able to tour the U.S. again due to high costs and financial risks.

“We cannot get insured and most of the big bands doing arena shows, by the time they do their first show and rehearsals, and get the staging and crew together, all the buses and hotels, you’re upwards $600,000 to a million in the hole. To earn that back, if you’re doing a 12-show run, you don’t start to earn it back until the seventh or eighth show.”

Daltrey concluded, “That’s just how the business works. The trouble now is if you get COVID after the first show, you’ve (lost) that money.”)

UK performers in the early to mid stages of their careers have often toured the US or Europe – the two biggest markets for British music – to build a fan base but usually lost money in the process.

Now the U.S. immigration service is threatening to raise visa costs from $460 to $1,615. For UK artists already struggling with Brexit red tape and the impacts of the pandemic lockdowns and inflation, such a hike in visa costs would make it almost impossible for anyone but the biggest stars to perform in America.

You are absolutely correct, and it has been a conversation that we have here now, and I’m sure other companies are having the conversation as well. Before we confirm dates, we are asking people to do a budget because some of the other tours that I know that were canceled. Didn’t Lorde postpone a bunch of her dates?  Another big artist, they booked the dates, and then they did the budget. Then it was, “Oh my God, we are going to lose half a million dollars.”

A slew of artists have canceled shows in the past 18 months citing mental health concerns or admittedly scrapped dates due to costs. Among those canceling commitments have been Lewis Capaldi, Animal Collective, Rage Against the Machine Arlo Parks, Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes, Chloe Moriondo, and Santigold.

In her newsletter to fans, Lorde blamed “a storm of factors” largely stemming from the pandemic, and said for many acts, “touring has become a demented struggle to break even or face debt” – and for some, it is “completely out of the question.”

American singer, songwriter, and YouTuber Chloe Moriondo bluntly canceled her UK and European tour “due to the cost of touring” –according to a statement. The singer was set to tour her third album ‘Suckerpunch’ earlier this year.

What we are saying to everybody now is, “Do your budget. We will book the date and we will see if there’s a shortfall or not”—and I’m sure that you have heard this from many people, whether it is crew costs, bus costs, gasoline costs, hotel costs, it doesn’t matter, it is up 20% to 25%. The sound and light company too. Everybody is trying to recoup two years of lost income, and things are higher.

Meanwhile, there’s great sensitivity today about ticket pricing. Concerns that the live music industry may just be catering to a wealthy segment of the audience that can afford tickets, especially for superstar shows, and it is excluding those who can’t afford such shows. And there’s a growing concern from some in the live music industry that some fans may turn away from live shows in general, even though with smaller shows with less popular acts, promoters are offering tickets at more affordable pricing.

The Taylor Swift ticket-sale meltdown last year has spurred a wave of legislative action at the state and federal level in the U.S. but  In most cases with superstar acts it’s not Ticketmaster setting the ticket price, it’s the artists.

Absolutely. I completely agree

Should we not be concerned about what pricing for music, sports, and theatre is doing in terms of changing audience habits? That their pricing is only reaching a certain audience demographic? That only certain people can afford to have a great experience at a show or game?

Furthermore, between COVID, and lack of affordability—or let’s call it competition for the dollar and high prices—perhaps, people who used to buy 4, 6, or 8 tickets a year in the $50 to the $70 range—maybe now they only buy one ticket to see an act at $300 because they can have a good seat.

Many people may never experience a live music show or a professional sports game or a theatrical show.

What I think is that they (artists and managers) don’t realize is if they don’t take care of the audience the audience will dwindle. They will think that it’s just a televised thing, and it’s not live.

Even with televised sports, you have to sign up for a significant fee.

Yeah for a subscription. You capture people when they are kids. In sports, in particular, but with music also. You capture them when they are in high school and college.

Steve, music and sports fans go to an arena, and a hot dog is $8 or $10, popcorn is $8, parking $25 to $40, beer ranging from $7.50 to $10.00. If you’re a big spender, you might opt for a 24 oz. King can of Heineken for a whopping $11.

Yep. You don’t even get nickel and dimed to death. You get $10 and $20 to death.

It’s common for a couple attending a concert to spend $120 on food and beverages

Yeah. It’s not healthy. It will be interesting to see at what point the audience pushes back.

After the Rolling Stones’ tour of 2016, with a standard pair of tickets being from $91 to $1,500–depending on where you sat, and what city the band was playing in— I thought that wasn’t going to ever fly again.

I was wrong.

When asked how to tell a ticket price is too high Canadian promoter Michael Cohl famously once said, “That’s easy. People don’t come.”

Yeah, and he’s right. Push back, you know.

Sarah McLachlan found that out with her final fourth women-centric Lilith Fair in 2010 with 10 canceled dates and performers like Carly Simon, Norah Jones, Kelly Clarkson, the Go-Go’s, and Queen Latifah bailing, fearing that they wouldn’t be paid.

They found that out with (Barbra) Streisand the second time around.

The “Barbra: The Music, The Mem’ries, The Magic” tour, presented by Live Nation Global Touring and S2BN Entertainment, began in 2017 and ran two years.  Tickets prices ranged between $90 and $510.

The reality is you find out how far can you push ticket prices. The audience holds back for the ticket price to come down.

Have you had to caution some of your acts and their management over what can be pulled out of a market? Have you said, “This is a good ticket price. Your ticket price is not a good ticket price. You don’t want to go that high for specific markets.”

Do you have those kinds of conversations?

All of the time. Sometimes I win. Sometimes I lose. I lost an argument on that recently with a manager and a client who wanted to go with a very aggressive P1 in theatres. I was like, “Let’s not do this.” Not big theatres. I said, “Guys, there’s a lot of competition out there.” It was relatively short notice that we put the tour together. It was the first time that this artist had toured on his own. I was like, “We have to invite people in, not give them sticker shock coming in.”

How did that turn out?

I was 100%  wrong. The manager I love and the client also. We went back and forth, and I was 100% wrong. These tickets sold at a significant price. We were doing 60%-70% business in some places, and making percentage. In this case, it worked. You’ve got to pick your niche, and I was wrong. When you are wrong you better cop to it.

Over the years. you have worked with so many Canadian acts. After selling your company,  The Music Business Agency to William Morris in 1989, you became one of WMA’s major booking agents, signing Crash Test Dummies, Barenaked Ladies, and The Band.

Today you represent Canadians Crash Test Dummies as well as Bruce Cockburn, Kiefer Sutherland, and Loreena McKennitt. What so attracts you to Canadian acts?

I never looked at it that way. I just do like Canadian artists going back to the ‘80s, I think that Kate & Anna McGarrigle were my first Canadian clients.

You were Kate & Anna’s agent for quite a long time.

I met (their sister manager) Jane McGarrigle. When I was a promoter, we promoted Kate & Anna at Carnegie Hall with Rick Danko opening.  Then I went to Magna Artists, and Jane and I just became friendly.

I began working in music in Toronto’s Yorkville Village in the mid-60s alongside True North Records’ founder Bernie Finkelstein who managed the Paupers, Kensington Market, Murray McLauchlan, and of course, Bruce Cockburn for years.

(Laughter). God bless Bernie. I’ve worked with Bernie and Bruce for 35 years. It could be a little longer actually. And I love them both.

Will  Paladin Artists eventually open an office in Canada?

I’m not going to say anything publicly about that right now.

You haven’t come to a decision to open an office in Toronto as of yet?

No. There’s some interesting chats going on. I see the complete viability of an office that goes across the board. There are some really good people up there that I enjoy talking to and working with. We have (previously) proven the model can work (with The Agency Group). I see great value in having a sister company office up there. Every now and then, you get really lucky; where a band is either doing well in Canada, and hasn’t broken through (in the U.S.) or vice versa. And once every couple of years, you get a Nickelback or City and Colour or the Arkells which still haven’t popped down here, but they are a great band. Or you get a Barenaked Ladies, a Crash Test Dummies. Or a Drake.

As an agent, you do get close to specific artists.Tell me about booking the legendary poet, and writer Robert Hunter who provided the Grateful Dead with many of their most enduring lyrics. He died in 2019.

While Hunter and Jerry Garcia played in a few bluegrass bands together, Robert passed on an offer to join Garcia’s pre-Grateful Dead jug band to focus instead on writing. 

He became a rock and roll icon through writing lyrics for the likes of “Dark Star” and “China Cat Sunflower” and proceeding through “Uncle John’s Band,” “Box of Rain,” “Scarlet Begonias,” “Touch of Gray,” “St. Stephen,” “China Cat Sunflower” and “Alligator.”

Robert performed only infrequently over the years.

He liked the concept of touring more than the reality of touring. Robert frequently rehearsed as if he was going to soon go out on the road, but it wouldn’t happen until years later. When I started working with him, it took me a few conversations to realize this isn’t a rock-and-roll guy.

He didn’t tour much. Was there a demand for him?

Well, it’s funny but there was a demand for him. He was reluctant about it. He enjoyed it.

Robert never played San Francisco although Hardly Strictly Bluegrass had a standing offer for him to play at its annual gathering in Golden Gate Park for a very respectable fee.

Yes. How do you know that?

He didn’t play San Francisco because he said he wanted to retain his anonymity.

Yeah, and I used to tease him about that. Maybe the story got into Relix  Magazine because I spoke about it at his funeral. I did tell that story about Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, but I didn’t mention the number (fee). They would offer him $50,000 to $75,000, and every year he’d go, “Nope, I don’t want to do it.” That was for 10 years. And then one year, he said to me, “What do you think?” I said, “What do I think? You never asked me that question. I think that you have a nice breakfast. You drive over the Golden Gate Bridge. You have lunch at the site. You play for an hour. You are home for dinner. And you put a new addition on the home. That’s what I think.” He said, “I like my anonymity.” I said, “Bob, you never leave the house. It doesn’t matter. Nobody is going to see you anyways.”

And he never did do it.

He never did do it.

Yet Robert fell in love with performing at the City Winery

He did. That is absolutely true. He did. Did you see the Grateful Dead documentary where they sort of ambushed him at the City Winery in Napa? It is really funny because he gets really cranky when he gets thrown off track.

Ironically, his last shows at the City Winery in New York, which we obviously didn’t know were going to be his last shows, they were some of the best shows that he ever, ever did.

Is that when Robert performed Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run?”

Yes. I was there that night (July 23, 2014). He did both “Born To Run” and “Touch of Grey.” It was only in that last year or so that he started doing “Touch of Grey.” Then, at one of those solo shows, he not only did “Touch of Grey,” but he also did Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” I was talking to Robert and his wife Maureen after the show and I said, “You could have bet me $10,000 that Robert would do ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Touch of Grey’ tonight, and I would have taken that bet in a heartbeat. No problem.”

Robert Hunter’s songwriting didn’t end with Jerry Garcia’s death of from heart attack in 1995. In the years after, he went on to co-write songs with Elvis Costello, Bruce Hornsby, Jim Lauderdale, the Dead’s drummer Mickey Hart, and Bob Dylan.

At the time of his death, Hunter was starting to plan some West Coast shows, if not a tour, in November 2019, but he died on Sept. 29^th at the age of 78 at his home in San Rafael, California.  Maureen of 37 years was by his side holding his hand. He was also survived by a daughter, Kate Hunter; a stepdaughter, Lotte; and several grandchildren.

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Queens, and then we moved out to Riverhead, Long Island in 1968. I was about 12.

That’s quite a change from Queens.

Oh, my gawd. it was quite a change. I was a semi-city kid, and Queens was hardcore and it could be very rural in that part of Eastern Long Island at the time. My dad was a car dealer. He started as a car salesman and he opened up a dealership in Riverhead with Volkswagen, Porches, and Audi which is a fun part of my job too sometimes.

You started in the music business in the ‘70s as a teenager, booking bands into Eastern Long Island venues including Hot Dog Beach, Artful Dodger, the legendary OBI, and  The Barge which was the floating night club on Dune Road, East Quogue that was the best-known club in The Hamptons.

I was booking bands in ’73 and ’74 in clubs in the Hamptons yes. I used to put bands into the Artful Dodger and OBI. I wasn’t legally allowed to get into the clubs. I was 17. It was where I learned about the power of ancillary revenue. Hot Dog Beach was right across the street from The Barge, and it had an incredible extensive sandbar in the Atlantic Ocean. Hot Dog Beach-Dune Road was basically on a sandbar in the Hamptons.

Through the summer of 1965, the Rascal’s legendary residency at The Barge, with Adrian Barber manning the soundboard, sparked a bidding war among many record labels. Phil Spector’s Philles, Columbia, Capitol, RCA-Victor and Atlantic all wanted to sign the group. The group chose Atlantic.

I was just a kid who talked his way into booking bands for $100 a week which was a fortune. It was unbelievable. I had to mow 100 lawns to get a hundred bucks. The Barges’ owner Dave McKibben had a giant parking lot, He used to sit in this big parking lot all day. I would go, “Dave do you want a break?” It would be 95 degrees. He would say, “I’m fine. Make sure the band is playing.” I would bring him a beer, and ask if he wanted a break and he’d go “No, no., no. Make sure the band is playing. That is all you have to do.” It took me several months to realize that he was doing about 5,000 cars a day, in and out for 12 bucks each, which was like a fortune. He was doing 100 grand a weekend in cash in 1973 in the parking lot. That’s why he never gave a shit.

You booked concerts while attending State University of New York at New Paltz.

I was a terrible student, but I was really good at putting on shows. So they kept me around because I was bringing in Bruce Springsteen, Jerry Garcia, and Labelle and Patti Smith when they were hot. We were only 60 miles from New York, and we were the perfect routing date. I knew how to talk to agents. Because it was an hour and a half north of the city. It didn’t conflict with anybody.

New York agents would have the choice of doing a play in Philly or coming to you.

Or they could do both. On a Tuesday night, we didn’t care. We had a small auditorium – a gym. I really got the appetite for seeing if I could make a career out of this. I had no idea. There was no playbook or course. I just knew that I liked doing it, and I liked no weekend shows. My two favorite times of the day are 8 o’clock and 11 o’clock when the lights go down and everybody gets excited, and when the band leaves and everybody is stroked. It’s fun to be part of the circus.

What was your major at State University?

Economics and I barely scratched through that in university. I was there for 4 1/2 years. I was in a car accident that took me out for a while, and then another semester I lost just because I never went to class.

Did you graduate?

Oh yes, I did. I did, by the skin of my teeth.

Did your success as a teenager working in the Hamptons, and then booking shows while in college give you the confidence in 1979 to seek a job in New York with concert promoter New Audiences which booked Muddy Waters, Tom Waits, Dire Straits, Weather Report and Miles Davis in New York, Boston, and Washington?

College gave me the appetite. My first job. Two wonderful guys, Art Weiner, and Julie Lokin, and that was their company. I eventually booked shows for them like the McGarrigles/Danko show.

It was so sad seeing Weather Report’s (co-founder  saxophonist and composer). Wayne Shorter’s passing in March (2^nd). Weather Report was a special band, and he was a lovely guy.

Wayne Shorter recorded more than 20 albums as a bandleader. Noting his work for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet, and then with the jazz fusion band Weather Report. New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff described Shorter in 2008 as, “Probably jazz’s greatest living small-group composer, and a contender for greatest living improviser.”

You then briefly worked as an agent at Magna Artists in 1982.

Magna, I loved being there. Ed Rubin was fantastic. Billy Hahn was the guy that hired me. Wayne Forte had ironically just left when I got there. I had a very important lesson there. At the time it was a really great agency, but through no fault of the agency it lost several great clients, Black Sabbath with Ozzy (Osbourne), ELO, and Chuck Mangione. Just the way the management things crumbled. I was 25, and I loved the office, and the people there were great. So Magna folded which really bugged me out. I really loved the job but there was the loss of a couple of major clients through no fault of theirs. It was just politics and happenstance, and they had to fold up. Ed Rubin went on to work for The Nederlander Organization, and I ended up going downtown and opened up MBA (Music Business Agency).

You operated MBA for 7 years before you sold it to the William Morris Agency (WMA) in 1989. Among your clients at MBA were Billy Bragg, Jimmy Cliff, Fela, Yellowman, Toots and the Maytals Robert Hunter, Jorma Kaukonen, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and Hot Tuna.

You developed mostly niche acts that larger competitors might not have been drawn to.

It was an interesting group at the time. Reggae music and world music were happening, Fela was quite a story, and Toots and the Maytals, and Yellowman were really popular at the time. And Billy Bragg and Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Jorma Kaukonen, and Hot Tuna did really well. It was an interesting amalgamation of people that I liked, and artistically respected. It was various interesting niches that came together.

Why was William Morris Agency so interested in bringing you into the fold?

At that time I was 28 or 29 and they wanted a younger person there with those up and coming acts which came out okay actually.

That was an interesting opportunity at the time. It was fascinating being at William Morris. I really learned there.  It was as if I was getting my doctorate because it was really interesting and there were a lot of really smart people there. There are friends from there that I have to this day.

Historically talent agencies concentrate on servicing their star clients until the moment that they realize that they need to refresh their rosters with emerging acts.

That is ongoing today.

You stayed at William Morris for five years before leaving to spearhead the fledgling New York office for the UK-based, Neil Warnock-founded The Agency Group where you first served as president of North American operations.

The Agency Group really took off after it launched in North America with the New York office opening in 1992. Serving as TAG’S president of operations in North America. and becoming a member of the company’s Senior Global Management Team, you built the company from 4 to 40 agents in America.

You represented a personal roster of more than 60 artists, including Dolly Parton, Brian Wilson, Bob Geldof, Billy Bragg, Bruce Cockburn, David Gilmour, the Scorpions, the New York Dolls, Ray Davies, Squeeze, King Crimson, Dream Theater, and others.

The Agency Group seemed like an interesting opportunity to do something independent with a goal of growing music and we certainly did that. We had a great collection of people in time and place.

You stayed at The Agency Group for quite a while as it became a concert industry powerhouse. The world’s largest independent music agency. Despite its growth, many people continued to regard The Agency Group as a boutique agency.

Yeah, 19 years (until 2013). We had a good run.

It’s funny that there were people I hired at The Agency Group that were in their 20s and I’ve now known them for 20 years. They were single and now they have families. It is very nice. The collective memory seems to have a very nice golden glow around that time period for a lot of people. It’s very, very sweet. It was a fun time and a fun group of people who worked very hard and did good work.

Given that you and many of your Paladin Artists team have worked in all of these different talent agencies over the years are you each able to adapt to various scenarios because you’ve experienced them before?

That’s what we hope. I do have the playbook. I was quite fortunate with situations—- whether it was MBA and grew that to the point where someone else was interested—- to The Agency Group that had tremendous growth. And yeah that was due to the many individuals there too. Natalia (Nastaskin), Bruce Solar, Andy (Somers) and others and I’m so proud of what all these people are doing now.

With all of the ongoing buyouts and mergers of promoters over the decades coupled with the overriding roles of Live Nation and AEG Live, is there room today for independent promoters in the business in America?

Some independents are doing quite well like Disco Donnie, Another Planet, Beaver Productions, and Frank Productions.

There is definitely room for independent promoters. It’s always nice to have an independent point of view, but it depends on the project. It really does. Live Nation is certainly good at doing certain things, and a lot of the time it’s not the name of the company. It’s who is doing the work. Who am I talking to? Like Jodi Goodman in San Francisco or Mike Belkin in Cleveland. These are people I have had a relationship with throughout my career and their careers. We all started around the same time. It is not like I am dealing with Live Nation in San Francisco, I am dealing with Jodi Goodman (president, Northern California). I’m dealing with Michael. The company is interesting, but it’s the people there. Of course, Riley O’Connor is my (Canadian Live Nation) guy in Toronto

Larry LeBlanc is widely recognized as one of the leading music industry journalists in the world. Before joining CelebrityAccess in 2008 as senior editor, he was the Canadian bureau chief of Billboard from 1991-2007 and Canadian editor of Record World from 1970-80. He was also a co-founder of the late Canadian music trade, The Record.

He has been quoted on music industry issues in hundreds of publications including Time, Forbes, and the London Times. He is co-author of the book “Music From Far And Wide,” and a Lifetime Member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

He is the recipient of the 2013 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, recognizing individuals who have made an impact on the Canadian music industry.

The post Interview: Talent Agent Steve Martin appeared first on CelebrityAccess.

Sound Royalties is a specialty finance firm based in West Palm Beach, Florida that offers financial support to musicians, songwriters, producers, and other music creatives.

Founded in 2014 by its CEO Alex Heiche, it enables qualified creatives to receive ongoing royalty advances over their advance term.

For creatives with as little as $5,000 in royalty income in the recent past, Sound Royalties can help leverage that into advance funding for their needs.

Sound Royalties is also leveraged to offer royalty advances up to tens of millions of dollars.

To serve its clients in 14 countries, Sound Royalties works with more than 130 payors and maintains an international network of representatives on three continents.

Sound Royalties’ model enables creators to retain full ownership of their copyrights while providing ongoing cash flow during the term of the advance. It works with varied royalty streams and helps find hidden royalties to increase their bottom line to maximize clients’ options.

It operates by advancing royalties paid through music labels, distributors, publishers, and PROs such as BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, SOCAN (in Canada), SoundExchange, and others.

It has collaborated with hundreds of creatives including such artists as Lil Wayne, Pitbull, Wyclef Jean, .and DJ Khaled; songwriters Steve Dorff, Larry Weiss, and Sonia Leigh; producer David Tickle; musician, producer, and composer Gilde Flores; and Too Lost, the American independent music, technology publishing, and distribution company.

Beyond not seeking ownership of copyrights, the company doesn’t even take a percentage of a creator’s future earnings. It offers fixed multiple pricing options over a fixed term.

Prior to founding Sound Royalties, Heiche who graduated in criminal justice from the University of Maryland, College Park, held executive positions in multiple high-tech software, and specialty finance firms.

Heiche has since had almost two decades of experience in providing cash and finance-raising strategies to large annuity recipients, and professional athletes as well as showing songwriters, artists, and producers how to make the music industry finance system work for them.

How much staff does Sound Royalties have?

We have about 50 full-time employees now based in West Palm Beach, Florida, and around the world.

Sound Royalties’ year-end results for 2022 showed that the company’s volume of fundings to music creatives grew by more than 90%  as it serves its clients in 14 countries, working with over 130 different publishers, PROs, and labels through an international network of representatives.

Launched in 2014, the company started having significant growth by 2018, but obviously, 2022 was a pivotal year.

I think it was. We have been growing year over year, but it just took off in 2022, and we are seeing that not letting up at all in 2023.

Was the growth a result of the slowdown of touring due to COVID, coupled with recording revenues drying up?  That creatives were looking at alternative revenue streams?

No. That would have come about in 2020 and 2021. What I think is that the company was founded in 2014, and at first, it was, “Never heard of you,” and “Don’t know what you do.” In 2015, and 2016, it was, “Oh, you are just one of those “pawn shops.” The black sheep of the music industry, a finance company probably, but I don’t know what you do.” Then 2017 and 2018, it was, “Well, this is too good to be true.”

That changed.

Yes, as more and more people started to adopt it, and understand what we were doing, it became, “Oh, it’s not too good to be true, It is true.” People are starting to realize that One: We are here to stay. Two: We are one of the good guys, and it isn’t too good to be true. And the (music) market is really starting to adopt it, and figure that out.

Sound Royalties offers financial support to musicians, songwriters, producers and others, and helps find hidden royalties to increase their bottom line without them having to sell away the rights to their works and catalogs.

If an artist has as little as $5,000 in royalty income in the recent past, the company will help them leverage that into advance money for their current needs.

Sound Royalties seems like a business manager crossed with a PRO.

I would say no. We don’t replace the PRO. We don’t replace the publisher, label, or distributor. Just think of us being that financial institution. All we do is allow you to advances on that (royalty) stream. So your business manager can still negotiate different deals with publishers, labels, and distributors, and we ensure that you are collecting from around the world in Neighboring Rights and whatever it may be.

When you are approached by artists, songwriters, producers, or whatever, your team does  financial diligence of their catalog; in essence big picture with attention to sources of income that these creatives are currently collecting; to other income streams they may not realize they should be receiving; but also projecting what new income streams might be coming in for them, to help forecast their potential earnings year over year into the future

Your team looks at what a catalog has done, and what it will likely do, right?

What it has done, and what it will do in the future of the existing works. We are not assuming that they are going to create more hits and continue to grow. It is, “What are those existing works over the next 5 or 10 years based on genre.” There’s a dozen different factors, but one is genre. Some genres peak on the charts this week and will be gone next week. Other genres take a long time to peak on the charts, but they have a long tail of decline of income that goes on almost in perpetuity. The age of the music, where it is in the net growth curve, the size of the catalog, and the depth of the catalog are all factors. How much of it is sync or non-repeatable income; domestic or foreign income? There are so many factors. All of that, we can look at, and we look at it all to then determine what something is going to be earning in the future.

One of the traditional direct ways to evaluate a catalog was by looking at the historical performance of the catalog, and then projecting out what you think the revenue might be into the future. Back when the industry wasn’t changing much that was a fairly simple exercise. What has changed is that there are so many new income streams that never existed even a few years ago.

Today, we’re still seeing growth in Interactive streaming services like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Pandora, and Google, and also seeing growth in a lot of the new media platforms, whether it be gaming, or in-home fitness, or social media like FaceBook, TikTok, Peloton, Roblox, Twitch, and Instagram.

Therein lies one of the great music publishing challenges: Figuring out how to unlock the hidden income of songs. 

You can do all this factoring with newer artists, songwriters, and producers with careers spread over a couple of years or with heritage talents owning extensive catalogs that may have been out of view for years, but still earn significant income verified by going, say, over back through three to five years of statements, agreements, and amendments.

Arguably, some catalogs have not been well-serviced over the years as labels haven’t wanted to know about and didn’t care about the heritage acts on their roster. They were then, and still are, more focused on emerging artists, and what can chart.

Also, there are unclaimed or unpaid royalties out there as affirmed by a NOI— which is a “Notice of Intention” to secure a compulsory license, and is a public notice identified in section 115(b) of title 17 of the United States Code.

When a digital provider streams music, it is obligated to secure a compulsory license from the work’s publisher. In instances where the digital provider cannot locate the publisher, they are allowed to a file Notice of Intentions, and these NOIs are allowed to be filed in bulk.

With global streaming revenues slowing, there is growing pressure on music rights holders to identify new growth drivers.  In addition to music royalty income streams, there are wider rights, such as merchandise, name and likeness rights, as well as Neighboring Rights, and producer royalties.

Correct. And we do work on the composition and sound recordings. It could be an artist. It could be a producer. It could be a writer. It could be an independent publisher. We work on both sides.

Music publishing is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and while complex it is one of the more stable sides of the music business. Like every other sector of the music industry, music publishing has been transformed by the growing global network of digital platforms and streaming services. Digital revenues have become significant for music publishers and songwriters and now compete with traditional revenue streams.

In recent years, we’ve seen the rise and expansion of independent music publishers, and self-published songwriters and creators.

Decades ago, affiliated publishers were down the hallway or on another floor from the record company, and label executives didn’t quite understand what was happening in the publishing world.

Plus, the publishing rates for music use were so incredibly low that affiliated publishers at large labels were virtual ignored.

The sound recording was King, and distribution was King.

Gradually, that changed quite a bit.

For decades, it seemed that traditional major publishers were buying catalogs as add-ons to their portfolios without any increased exploitation; riding on the coattails of their record label partner, doing little more than trying to have a great operational backroom, and sending along a check to the songwriters and co-publishers involved.

At the same time, song publishing was often routinely assigned by a label to an affiliated publisher after an artist signed a recording contract. In some cases, songwriters would try to reclaim songs, but often their attitude about business, in general, had been “I don’t want to know.”

Over the years I’ve told many rights holders how they are leaving money on the table, and they mostly looked at me in disbelief

Today’s rights holders, however, seem far more knowledgeable about ownership and their copyrights.

Yeah, just over the long curve. Look at the deals. Publishing used to be not even a co-pub deal. Then it became more popular, and it became standard to be a co-pub, a 50/50 deal on the publishing side. Then over time admin (administration deals) started to creep into the mix, and are much more prevalent today than ever before. Co-pub deals are happening where you are getting that creative think-pitching for that extra help, but those deals are being negotiated for different rates than just straight 50/50. We have fewer and fewer writers that come to us saying, “I’m self-published. I am BMI or I am ASCAP, or I am SOCAN (in Canada) and therefore I am collecting all of my writing and publishing.”

Now you need to make sure that you are collecting your publishing side as well as well as your sync, and mechanicals. The Mechanical Licensing Collective (the nonprofit U.S. organization established under the Music Modernization Act of 2018) has done an amazing job of coming online, and educating those that are self-published. For those with songs that are self-published, they are seeing this, and understanding more of, “Okay what is the publishing side of my writer’s share? My writer’s share is really just more a performance writer’s share, and then the publishing side is the sync, mechanical ,and performance. What am I negotiating for that?” I think that they understand that better than before.

After your team begins working with a client, and have appraised the value of their catalog, and have a summary of their assets, do you suggest distributors or labels for future deals?

We do not. We do not want to interfere with the creative relationship with the publishers, labels, and distributors. So we are kind of like Switzerland. We stay neutral, but enable them to have the freedom to decide what they are going to retain, and who they are going to work with. A clear point in that is that we are not favoring anyone. We work with over 130 different publishers, PROs and labels right now. And that number is rapidly growing.

A business manager can explain to them what their obligations are, and what deals are risky or not risky.

Yep. And so our role is to provide the funding so they can negotiate the deals that they want to negotiate. They can come to us for financing, and then negotiate the best deal for themselves without having to focus on the advance portion.

In essence, you are a financing partner able to support their goals over the long term.

Correct without taking any assets. So there are investors and financiers. An investor becomes a partner, and they want a percentage. So if they are expecting to earn $100,000, and you earmark $10 million, then they get a percentage of that $10 million. If we say “Here’s $8, pay us back $10,” you can make a billion dollars, but you are still only pay us back $10.

Sound Royalties offers multiple pricing options starting off at a 4% rate?

It’s in the single digits. It all depends on what it is, and the risk. What I saw in the industry was the need for a partner or a financial company that was working with creatives. Not against them. I want to be a partner or part of something with them. That is what the vision (of the company) was initially, and it created something that is much bigger, and it kept growing and growing.

Sound Royalties will work with people facing IRS liens?

Yes.

Why? That would seem considerably risky. They could lose most everything, and Sound Royalties would be out of pocket as well.

Well, that it is just it. So if a creative has a lien, we will analyze and look at it, and quite often still provide them with funding. It enables them to either get on a payment plan, pay the IRS, or do what they need to do. But we do not put them at risk.

We still hold true that risk.

If the IRS seizes that (revenue) stream, we are taking that risk.

We are not going against them. So we are price basis on risk. So the higher the risk, the higher the cost. So for every 10 deals that we do that are IRS liens, we  assume that 7 will not get seized, and three will. So the 7 have to pay for the principal and the interest for the 10. But the creative is able to get money, and if the IRS seizes the stream, we’re taking that risk.

The IRS rarely forgives tax debts, but one thing about an IRS lien is that it forces people to be realistic about their situation, and realize that they can’t ignore the fact that something needs to be done. IRS plans typically allow debtors to pay off the balance owed plus penalties and interest over a 36-month period.

Yes.

What did you see before launching Sound Royalties in 2014 that led you to identify the gaping need for funding options for music professionals? What led you to believe that there was a business there?

You must have seen something. That artists, songwriters, producers, and others were being screwed whenever taking on loans and that there was a better way to address this?

I basically made the decision that I wanted to come into the music industry. I jumped off a cliff and decided to build the airplane on the way down. And that airplane would be a music company. The first thing that I knew was that I didn’t know enough about royalties, publishing, or labels to buy one of those or to go that route. But I knew finance. So the first thing that I did was that I visited every specialty finance company, and every bank that had an entertainment division, and talked to them. For the private financial companies, I asked, “What are you guys doing? Who are you turning away? Can I partner with you? Can I buy you?”

What was their response to you showing up and asking insider-type finance questions?

They all opened their doors, and they were all very welcoming.

Was this in Nashville?

No. L.A., San Francisco, and Nashville.

How did they view that side of their business at the time? As you know, there’s always been an uneasy relationship in general between the financial community, and the music business.

So in visiting all of them, I realized that the music business was songwriters, producers, labels, distributors, publishers, and entertainment lawyers, but not finance. The finance companies were considered outsiders. Either there was an entertainment banker from a major bank that the banker themselves were considered part of the industry or the rest were considered outsiders because they were “the pawnshops.” They were buying people’s copyrights for pennies on the dollar, preying on them when they were in desperate need, or they were giving them (music industry people) usurious loans, overextending them, and then seizing (assets) in default.

That is when I said, “I don’t want to buy in and be part of that.” I said “I will create my own, and it will operate more like a bank. We won’t buy, and we won’t even take in default.” Some of the entertainment banks, one in particular here in Nashville where I had become friends with, and is a long-time friend now, said, “Listen, you will never make money if you operate in that sense because there’s not enough deal volume.”

What was your immediate reaction?

My thought process was, “Well, if I build this company, Sound Royalties, as long as we don’t lose money, and we are small niche company serving those who understand what we do, it’ll be great.”

As I recall, word got around quickly about Sound Royalties in industry circles.

Yes, it took off, but at first, it was considered too good to be true. As the attorneys started to look at it, and the industry started to see it, and we started to have longevity in the industry, people started to realize, “This is different than what was offered before. They are more part of the music industry.” We have been accepted as part of the industry and as a music finance company.

With your background in holding executive jobs in high-tech software and specialty finance firms, you had enough training to know to keep your eye on where the money was coming from in the music industry.

You quickly learned to navigate complex copyright and royalty issues because you knew to follow the money.

You discovered the considerable lag time in payments from recordings and music publishing. Anywhere from 6 to 12 months or more in the past to attain royalties owed. Today, in the period of computers and digital distribution, creators are being paid in a more timely fashion.

If you look over the past few years the publishers have gone from once a year (royalty payments), and then it was twice a year, then quarterly, and some are even paying monthly now to keep pace with the admin, and the digital alignment companies. Or on the distribution side, it used to be twice a year for some labels, and then it was quarterly, and now it’s monthly. And it is picking up as things are going digital. But that was part of the understanding even before I created Sound Royalties. I saw that there was a huge lag time. People had hit songs, and they didn’t have money to self-promote, get on the road or do whatever they wanted to do, and that there was a need in this industry. But even as that process has sped up, there’s still a need for fair funding that doesn’t give up everything and doesn’t put at risk their creations.

Presently, private equity and other investment groups have discovered the value of recorded music, and music publishing catalogs. Of late there have been ongoing rounds of catalog acquisitions with catalogs being valued for triple or quadruple what they might have sold for a few years ago.

Music assets are attractive to investors because they’re relatively safe and stable, and there have been increased applications on how to exploit songs if they still bringing in income. So there are a myriad of deals on the table these days, and so many different variations available.

Why is Sound Royalties’ emphasis on retaining copyrights? Not everybody should retain their copyrights.

Sure, there is a reason when you may want to give them up, or it’s time to let them go. But the reason we are seeing is the high dollar being paid, which is then further creating the interest, and an increase in the volume of creators letting go of their copyrights is the fact that in a streaming world, in a digital age, copyright is King.

Ownership is King.

It used to be in publishing that the works could be created, and be more valuable over time, but in a streaming world, you are getting six to one for the royalties for the sound recording versus the composition. So ownership is King, and it makes a huge difference, and there is a need to own. You hear someone selling for a 17 or 20 multiple, I saw a 33 multiple late last year. Nobody is waiting 17 or 20 years or 33 years to collect a principal, never mind any interest back. What they see is what we see which is this wall of money coming as the world switches to streaming that is legitimizing the consumption of music.

Streaming is still set up for the old style music business model. Despite the majority of music on streaming services being sourced from independents, indie artists have it tough because content from the three majors dominates the top tiers of popular tracks.

The majors still have the digital muscle.

Yeah.

As Music Business Worldwide founder Tim Ingram has argued  (Oct. 6th, 2022 issue), “With 100,000 tracks uploaded to streaming services daily, cutting through the noise with niche music, that often fits best in an albums market, rather than the singles-focused world of 2023, is arguably incredibly difficult. At the same time, short-form content that powers platforms like TikTok isn’t always the best opportunity for deep engagement with an artist that might be the antithesis of a one-hit-wonder.”

Ingham further explains that, according to Spotify’s Loud & Clear data, just over 14,700 DIY artists generated more than $10,000 from both recorded music and music publishing combined on Spotify in 2022. And that figure actually fell year-on-year.

In terms of profitability, Spotify still lost half a billion dollars In 2022 though it reportedly added 10 million net Premium subscribers in the final quarter of the year. It added another 5 million net Premium subscribers to its user base in Q1 2023 (the three months to end of March), taking its total global paying subs audience to 210 million.

Spotify forecasts that it will end Q2 of 2023, at the end of June with 217 million Premium subscribers with the addition of 7 million net new subscribers additions in the quarter.

Warner Music Group CEO, Robert Kyncl believes that music is “undervalued,” that music from certain types of artists—especially those high-value artists and songwriters who attract subscribers to streaming services—should be paid more than other types of music.

Meanwhile, SoundCloud recently teamed up with Merlin, the digital music licensing agency for independent labels, on a global licensing deal, allowing Merlin members and their artists to participate in SoundCloud’s Fan-Powered Royalties (FPR) model, a user-centric model that allocates a share of each listener’s subscription and advertising revenues only to the artists/tracks they individually listen to.

What Spotify needs to do is revamp its pro-rata “one big pot” streaming model.

Yes. But the whole digitalization of the content is legitimizing the consumption of music. Listen, we have 339 million people in America that listen to music (in fact 82 million Americans pay an average of $10 a month for on-demand music streaming services),  and there are 43 million in Latin America.

There’s 55 million monthly active users in India (with 10 billion tracks streamed monthly), and in China, there’s another 684 million. Those people may not pay 10 yuan or 10 rupees. They are watching through YouTube ads, their eyes, they pay for that consumption of music, and it’s tracked and that is creating a wall of money.

Also, sync was up 15% last year. We had these platforms licenses coming online, whether it’s TikTok or Facebook, that are starting to generate revenue for creatives that weren’t before. So pay to the creative is on the upswing, and that is why you are seeing these high dollar amounts (in selling catalog). Even as the interest rate went up, and some of the investors that were more financial investors, not industry players, had stepped aside. The multiples aren’t necessarily coming down because the wall of money is coming closer, and people are seeing these increases.

Despite indications of a slowdown in some territories, the global music subscriber streaming market continues to stand strong.

While synchs have been a remarkably consistent revenue stream for the recording industry over the past 5 years, however, there are warning clouds as Netflix, HBO, Disney, The CW, and others have indicated they will shortly slash their budgets for TV and movie content. The result, if there are fewer shows, will be fewer places to place music. The music industry would be affected as labels and publishers generally split revenue from synch licenses 50-50.

Forbes has posted that Netflix reportedly plans to cut its spending costs by $300 million in 2023 largely because the company had to postpone its initiative to limit password and account sharing, which was expected to generate new revenue. The powerful streamer had initially planned to restrict password sharing in the first quarter.

One positive thing is that while global streaming is slowing, the industry is more practiced in aggressively retrieving revenue from foreign markets.

Yeah, without a doubt. So the money is flowing. You are seeing more Neighboring Rights coming through and coming online. There are increases in what someone was earning 5 years ago to today, and it is dramatic, and it is going to continue to rise.

With Sound Royalties now operating in Canada after the recent hiring of Vanessa Thomas (as Regional Director of Business Development and Artist Relations), joining other international representatives in London and South America, you have had to learn about the scale of the specific challenges confronting the Canadian publishing and recording communities, and some of the intricacies of other potential revenue sources.

Canada does an amazing job with grants and other things supporting creatives that I wish we would see more of that domestically here in the United States, and even around the world in other countries. We are growing with Latin America and Europe. But yeah, there’s a lot more opportunities given to the artist there (in Canada).

Sound Royalties could well be a lifeline for those artists, writers, and producers when in a dispute with a label or with a publisher. Instead of their careers being stalled, they could move on to further projects with financial support1 and a partnership with Sound Royalties.

I remember that Sound Royalties teamed up with Lil Wayne in 2016 to help finance a number of his projects while he was locked in legal disputes. First in 2015 with Cash Money Records, as well as its co-founders Bryan “Birdman” Williams and Ronald “Slim” Williams. Wayne. Then, in 2016 slapping Cash Money’s distributor, Universal Music Group (UMG) with another lawsuit, claiming unpaid royalties from both his music, and from the artists his Young Money label helped foster, including Drake and Nicki Minaj.

Lil Wayne was appreciative of Sound Royalties’ support saying, “Sound Royalties understands the music world and is helping me utilize my past successes to fund and propel new projects and to continue creatively evolving.”

(Lil Wayne’s legal team had filed a federal lawsuit against UMG seeking over $40 million in damages, claiming that UMG was repaying its own debts with Young Money royalties following the $100 million advance it reportedly gave Cash Money. Two years later, Lil Wayne settled the two lawsuits with Cash Money Records and UMG, which paved the way for the release of, “Tha Carter V.” In June 2020, Lil Wayne sold Young Money’s entire catalog of masters for a reported $100 million to UMG.)

Those types of disputes are fairly common. So do artists, songwriters, and producers come to you for bridge funding in those cases as the only revenue an artist would be earning would be by touring?

Correct. If something raises a question about the royalty payout, they are frozen until that can be settled which squeezes the creative because it just stops their payment, and the money sits. So we regularly do get creatives coming to us looking for financing to bridge the gap.

Many hold the view that it was producer Norman Petty withholding royalties that led Buddy Holly to reluctantly join the lineup of the “Winter Dance Party” a tour of small towns in the frozen upper Midwest in 1959, where he died in a small plane crash along with J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, and Ritchie Valens, near Clear Lake, Iowa on February 3^rd, 1959.

That’s just terrible.

Norman Petty was an independent producer who owned the Clovis, New Mexico studio where Buddy Holly and the Crickets recorded most of their tunes between 1956 and 1958. In addition to taking control of Holly’s career and finances, Petty added his name to songwriting credits — a dubious, but not uncommon practice in those days.

Holly’s royalty rate on records sold was quite favorable for the time-5% 90% of the retail price of records sold.

However, as a co-writer with Jerry Allison and Petty, Holly only received 16 2/3^rd% of the songwriter royalties from the Crickets’ first hit, “That’ll Be the Day.”

The other 50% of the royalties went to music publishing companies Peer Southern Music, and Nor-Va-Jak Music-then owned by Norman and Vi Petty.

A cash-strapped Holly eventually grew resentful of Petty’s control, and he and his new wife, Maria Elena, visited Petty to end their partnership and seek his unpaid royalties.

In an interview with Reuters, Maria Elena Holly, recounted that Petty told his young protégé, “You know what, Buddy? I’m gonna say this to you. I’d rather see you dead than to give you the money now.”

In 1976, Paul McCartney, purchased the entire Holly song catalog—some 40 songs– from Petty. McCartney never shied away from talking about the influence of Buddy Holly and the Crickets on the Beatles, even pointing out that a version of “That’ll Be the Day” was the first song that he and John Lennon would record in a small Liverpool studio.

After Holly’s death, his family chased alleged unpaid royalties from Universal Music Group label for decades.

Tell me about providing significant funding to Too Lost, the rapidly growing independent music, technology publishing, and distribution company that serves more than 185,000 artists and labels. As of August 2022, Sound Royalties has funded the company for a combined total of $5.3 million enabling Too Lost to retain full equity of their firm while it continued building its catalog and operations.

What was the attraction to you working with Too Lost?

For Too Lost, the attraction was they are an organization similar to ours with a mission to empower and protect artists, songwriters, producers, and performers. Working with us enabled them to raise capital, and retain full equity in their company. Like with what we do with artists, we don’t take ownership, and we didn’t with them. That became a waterfall effect in what they were doing with the creative, and that was very attractive to us. To be able to provide the funding like we normally do without taking ownership of a company that is protecting and empowering artists, performers, producers and songwriters.

That was quite a chunk of money to advance to a company.

Earlier you mentioned the $5,000 as being the minimum (of our involvement). That may have to go up just because of the amount of volume of deals that are coming through. But our goal is to help as many as possible, and that is why we put the bar so low but on the top end, we will advance $10 million for an income stream. So a creative could come with multiple incomes and get tens of millions dollars.

C’mon, you set the entry level at $5,000 initially to have bait in the water to attract as many creatives as possible and also to proclaim that Sound Royalties was destined to be a significant player win entertainment. You knew you were going to attract a lot of people with that minimum amount.

Absolutely, and it’s a great service to as many writers that we can work with but as that volume has gone up the cost of processing a transaction tends to be more.

Back to your initial comment, I think that it was Quincy Jones who said that “publishing is a penny business, but there’s a whole lot of pennies.” Now that it’s streaming it has become a micro penny business but there’s even more micro pennies, right?

There’s so much more revenue flowing through now.

Prior to the music business becoming the first industry to have a physical commodity that could be digitized, uploaded to the web, and easily pirated, music publishing was referred to as “the widget business” as deals were often being made on a song-by-song basis.

I hadn’t heard that one.

Old-time publishers would say, “We sell widgets, but we sell a lot of widgets.”

Yes.

Traditionally, music publishers balanced working their catalogs while nurturing new writers. A music publisher used to walk a songwriter/artist to a label to find that money.

Labels being king had all of the money.

The unbundling of the album by Napster, iTunes, and Spotify led to the music industry being downsized from a dollars business to a dime business. Publishers had to first grow their businesses by acquisitions, and moving further into foreign markets.

Also, following downsizing, major labels jettisoned certain services, as songwriters pushed for more than synchronizations and writer collaboration opportunities as well as marketing plans, and brand marketing from their music publisher. Songwriters pushed their publishers to get proper compensation from new media for music usage. Publishers continued to further develop their songwriters by walking them to a label, but numerous music publishers also tipped their toes into the label pond.

So the identity of the music publishing sector began to change.

Music being consumed via streaming rather than being purchased has brought about profound industry shifts; from the value of music to the management of rights. Certainly, major labels continue to seek to participate in publishing. and many of the smaller independent labels now need publishing revenue streams to exist.

At the same time, more and more companies like BMG Rights Management have become music rights companies handling publishing and master rights as well as other ancillary rights.

Plus, with digital, the industry, thus your own business, became increasingly more global.

Correct.

Securing investment from international sources, especially in Europe, can be daunting.

Well yeah if you use a bank in Europe their rates are similar to banks in North America, right? But if you go to Latin America and you are highly credit worthy and low risk, they are still in the upper teens from a traditional bank. So it’s not just hard, it’s expensive.

Major labels segregated music for decades by having Urban and Latin departments. The internet has done what radio wasn’t fully able to do; that is fully desegregate music. Radio formats were a form of segregation. The internet broadens the scope of the market. I find many of the Latin and hip hop and rap stars to be the smartest people in the marketplace.

Urban and Latin communities were the first to understand that the artist is the product and one that could be developed into other forms of entertainment and merchandise.

American banks, being then almost lily white, were not about to open their doors to the Latin and Urban worlds. So many artists established full-service production companies as well as artist management affiliates and film and television production affiliates with the  attitude, “We make music, but we are also a product.”

Yep.

At one time, hip hop and rap didn’t travel outside North America but artists like 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Puffy Daddy, Eminem, LL Cool J, Cardi B, Nicki Minaj, Ludacris, and Drake today have worldwide followings with consumers of American pop culture.

The 2017 success of “Despacito,” performed by Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and later in a bilingual version with Justin Bieber, kickstarted a new wave of Latin music mainstream success for the likes of J Balvin, Rosalía, Cardi B, Bad Bunny, and others.

“Despacito” transformed the way Latin music is viewed and listened to today. You couldn’t avoid the song if you tried.

Streaming has made it easier for listeners to discover music scenes such as reggaeton and Latin trap without those artists needing the marketing machine of a major label. In other words, audiences around the world are crossing over into Latin music.

Yes. It’s incredible. It’s a worldwide market. As the money starts to grow and creatives are smart in terms of turning to the world market “Despacito” was the simplest example. Or the clearest early example. The numbers that they are doing in Latin America are incredible.

In 2017  “Despacito” soared to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, and stayed there for a then-record 16 weeks, “Despacito” broke  all sorts of records, including most weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart, and is the most-viewed music video on YouTube with 8.13 billion views as of Apr 17th, 2023.

As Leila Cobo, author of “Decoding ‘Despacito’: An Oral History of Latin Music.” wrote in Billboard in 2022, “But half a decade later, the starkest legacy left by Despacito’ is how it changed the world’s perception of Latin music, and how it changed the way the industry itself regarded and marketed music in Spanish.”

One sector virtually ignored by mainstream media is EDM. It is a music genre that has experienced an unprecedented surge in popularity since 2010 starting with its iconic artists David Guetta, Deadmau5, Tiesto, Ritchie Hawtin, Armin van Buuren, Swedish House Mafia, Calvin Harris, and Skrillex since  followed by Marshmello, Martin Garrix, ODESZA, EVAN GIIA, Louis the Child, TroyBoi, and Jai Wolf who each are now doing great live numbers.

Yeah, absolutely but they (EDM artists) sample a lot. I think that is what it is and it’s different. There are a lot of mixtapes and there’s a lot of sampling. I think that their revenue stream because of that is going to be live performances.

Sound Royalties is part of the GoDigital Media Group, a privately held multi-national, diversified conglomerate, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California.

Founded in 2006 by Jason Peterson, GoDigital Media Group is focused on technology-enabled and vertically integrated intellectual property rights management.

Under GoDigital Media Group’s sizeable umbrella are also: Cinq Music Group, a pioneer in combining the services of distributor, record label, and financial institution; Latido Networks, a holding company for media companies, Mitú and Latido Networks that includes Latido Music, and NGL-mitú, the Latino media and video brand; VidaPromo, the multi-platform network for Latin Rhythm music; and AdShare, providing social media monetization services for music, film, television, and sports rights-holders online.

Also, there’s YogaWorks Inc., the world’s premier provider of yoga instruction.

Additionally, there’s also Eastern Mountain Sports, a leading outdoor apparel brand and retailer, and Bob’s Stores, a retailer of apparel, and footwear with a 68-year history in the Northeastern U.S. Both were purchased from U.K.-based Frasers Group for $70 million last year.

Where does Sound Royalties fit into GoDigital Media Group’s media and monetization mix?

When I founded Sound Royalties, and then moved it from Virginia to Florida, I had a friend and partner who had a company, Novation Ventures in Florida, that was a specialty finance company. So who do you hire? Do you want to hire two people? Do you hire an accountant? Do you hire a lawyer? Do you hire a researcher? Well, if you put it against this company (GoDigital Media Group), you can use half of a lawyer, and a quarter of an accountant, and two researchers.

Leverage the employees across those platforms, and that started a Petri dish for a startup, and it really helped Sound Royalties take off.

Is Novation Ventures still around?

Yes, but it’s not tied to Sound Royalties. They were owned by a private equity firm. When they came to us and said, “You guys are doing great, but we are 13 years into a 10 year fun, and we need to go to market with this.” So we looked at a bunch of companies that were interested in acquiring and becoming the new financial partner for Sound Royalties and  GoDigital was the choice that we made from the various entities that came forward that were interested in acquiring Sound Royalties, and to this day I believe it was the best choice that we made. Jason and GoDigital are a great financial partner for helping Sound Royalties continue with our mission.

GoDigital’s leadership team consists of C-suite executives with in-depth retail expertise, hailing from widely recognized global brands such as BCBG, Gap, and Next. With these affiliated companies under the GoDigital corporate umbrella, there’s great potential for crossover synergy.

If you look at all of the (GoDigital-affiliated) companies, all of the companies-YogaWorks, Bob’s Stores, and Eastern Mountain Sports–they are all run independently and separately. Sound Royalties continues to be run independently and separately as it always has.

Are you still a co-owner of the boutique Studio Bank headquartered in Nashville, with retail branches in Franklin, and Clarksville, Tennessee?

That’s an FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) federally regulated and insured bank and it continues to grow and do well.

You are still co-owner?

Yes. There’s a group of us (investors, and bankers) invested in the foundation of that.

How long have you been living in Nashville?

Five or six years.

Over the years, Nashville has undergone a sizeable transformation. The city, and the surrounding region, experienced 16% population growth over the past decade, compared to 6% on average for the entire U.S., making it the 7th fastest growing large Metropolitan Statistical Area.

The current metro area population of Nashville is 1,315,000, a 1.62% increase from 2022.

A different town than it was.

There are 32 buildings going up right now that are 20 stories or more.

Downtown Nashville has seen an exceptional amount of public and private investment in the past decade including mixed-use luxury commercial and residential projects, retail towers, hotels, and residential units.

It’s incredible. It’s like Dubai or something.

As you were graduating from the University of Maryland, College Park what career did you have in mind?

(Laughing) I didn’t know. But while in college, I found software and that is were that path and pursuit happened. My degree is in criminal justice due to my interest in law.  I first focused my interest in pre-law.

You became engaged with software early on, a decade before the market imploded.

It was taking off. It was in late ‘90s when the bubble burst on it. This was 8 or 10 years earlier as it was still growing. With software, if you go back to the ‘80s, there’s weren’t computer degrees per se. They weren’t as prevalent. So the computer companies were recruiting from music departments because the way the brain works for a musician is similar to the way of that as a programmer. They are writing songs, and they are writing code to create a story, to tell a story, to create an environment. And it is a similar mind-set.

Before the invention of the World Wide Web in 1993, most Internet access still was from personal computers and workstations directly connected to local area networks (LANs) or from dial-up connections using modems, and analog telephone lines.

By the mid-1990s, Netscape had about 80% of the browser market in the U.S. and Europe. Its only real competitor was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which first launched with Windows 95.

It wasn’t until Apple purchased Steve Job’s NeXT to improve Mac OS, and he returned to Apple, delivering an inspirational speech in 1997 detailing the future of Mac OS, leading Microsoft to invest $150 million in the firm that things began to change.

By 1998, the Apple iMac and PowerBook G3 were popular, and Apple was a force to be reckoned with.

Apple’s first iPhone in 2007 had a 3.5-inch screen, a 2-megapixel camera, and topped out at just 16 GB of storage. It didn’t even support third-party apps.

The iPhone is only 16 years old.

Isn’t that amazing? What are we on now iPhone 15 generation?

The iPhone 15 series may still be several months away but leaks claim that Apple is planning to restrict the phone’s USB-C charging and data transfer speeds for all cables that are not certified through its Made for iPhone (MFi) program. In response, the European Union has threatened to ban the sale of iPhones in member countries.

Meanwhile, I’m looking to update my MacBook Pro, but I hesitate to get another. There are many reasons to want a MacBook Pro. They are highly lauded for their user-friendliness, performance, longevity, and having an enormous suite of high-quality software pre-installed. The issue is that MacBook Pros are extremely expensive, and it isn’t clear why.

I replaced mine three years ago after five years with the MacBook Pro, and I didn’t notice a change.  It didn’t speed up, it didn’t slow down. I’m not sure I needed to switch it out. They seem to go on forever.

Where are you originally from?

I was born and raised in the Silver Sprin-Olney Maryland area. My father was a government worker, s chief scientist for the Navy. My mom taught French cooking. I have an older brother.

Were you a concertgoer growing up?

Absolutely. I loved music. I just wanted to ride my bike, and play music. I played half a dozen instruments. Those were the two things that I wanted to do. My dad was extremely bright. Two PhDs, and two Masters degrees, all in different languages from top schools. He was an aeronautical engineer, an electrical engineer, a mathematician, and a physicist. So to my parents, I was stupid. My dad was like, “Unless you straighten up, you are going to be a ditch digger for all your years.” I just wanted to ride my bike, and play music, and I eventually found my way back to music.

The Washington D.C./Baltimore Maryland corridor has been the traditional home for folk, jazz, and bluegrass, and due to the turnover of people in the cities from overseas, also worldbeat music as well. You don’t see such broad musical choices in many other American cities

The corridor houses The Birchmere, the legendary music hall in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, heralded by many as one of the finest music venues in the world.

I don’t know if you know that club.

Of course, yeah.

Neko Case and Stewart Copeland were born in Alexandria, and it has also been the hometown of David Grohl, Jim Morrison, as well as Cass Elliot, and John Philips of the Mamas & the Papas,

Yeah, exactly. A lot of people don’t realize it but Old Town Alexandria, Virginia (a city along the western bank of the Potomac River, approx. 6 miles south of downtown Washington) Jim Morrison, and David Grohl, they were right off Walnut Street. I lived in Alexandria a bit near the end, but it was on the Maryland side is where I started, and then moved to Northern Virginia and from there to good ole Nashville.

Jim Morrison moved to Northern Virginia as a kid after his father, a rear admiral in the Navy, was assigned to the Pentagon. The family lived for a time in the 1950s in a colonial house on a large corner plot at 310 Woodland Terrace.in Alexandria’s North Ridge neighborhood.

In the spring of 1999, David Grohl moved from Seattle and bought a house on Nicholson Lane in the Del Ray North Ridge area of Alexandria. Fellow Foos Taylor Hawkins and Nate Mendel also moved in. Here, Grohl built a 24-track recording studio in the basement, and the trio recorded virtually their entire third album, “There is Nothing Left to Lose”

There’s the Wharf in DC which is pretty good. It is relatively new and has a lot of acts to see. Another great music venue is The Anthem (in the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood of Washington.)

(The Wharf is a multi-billion dollar development about 4-5 years old on the Potomac. There are several venues there. The big one is The Anthem, operated by IMP (It’s My Party/Seth Hurwitz) which seats up to 2,800, and 6,000 for standing. It is rented out to outside promoters. The other venues are Union Stage and Pearl Street Warehouse.)

Larry LeBlanc is widely recognized as one of the leading music industry journalists in the world. Before joining CelebrityAccess in 2008 as senior editor, he was the Canadian bureau chief of Billboard from 1991-2007 and Canadian editor of Record World from 1970-80. He was also a co-founder of the late Canadian music trade, The Record.

He has been quoted on music industry issues in hundreds of publications including Time, Forbes, and the London Times. He is co-author of the book “Music From Far And Wide,” and a Lifetime Member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

He is the recipient of the 2013 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, recognizing individuals who have made an impact on the Canadian music industry.

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Robert Deaton is a much-loved and respected individual who leads an extraordinary life.

Deaton has notably served as the executive producer of the CMA Awards on ABC-TV since 2007.

In 2021, the Country Music Association extended its long-standing partnership with Deaton which includes the annual CMA Awards in addition to “CMA Fest,” and “CMA Country Christmas.”

The new pact will see the highly respected television producer and award-winning director in the CMA producer’s chair through 2026.

Earlier in the same year, the CMA renewed its contract with its network television partner ABC-TV also through to 2026.

Deaton also currently serves as executive producer of the Billboard Music Awards on NBC-TV.

Deaton is in such high demand because he delivers.

As Garth Brooks said when the CMA extended Deaton’s contract for its television properties, “Any gig you have with Robert Deaton, you know, as an artist and as a viewer, it’s gonna be killer. I have had the great fortune of sharing some magical moments throughout the years with Robert. He is a gift to all of us within Country Music and beyond.”

One of Deaton’s first professional jobs in Nashville after leaving Fayetteville, North Carolina was as a 19-year-old production assistant on a Crisco commercial with Loretta Lynn at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. The next week he did some work at the historical RCA building in Nashville’s Music Row with singer/guitarist/actor Jerry Reed.

Deaton then thought, “I have made it.”

After a stint in the local freelance film community, Deaton got offered a job at Knight Ridder Broadcasting’s ABC affiliate WKRN-TV 2. He was in the news department for the first year, and then he worked in the marketing department. for the next couple of years.

His production work eventually gained national media exposure, airing on such programs as “Good Morning America,” “The Phil Donahue Show,” and “ABC News,” to name a few.

In 1985, Deaton and George Flanigen co-founded the full-service film production company, Deaton Flanigen Productions. Together, they compiled an impressive catalog of  500 music videos, including for Martina McBride, Faith Hill, Alabama, Brooks & Dunn, Kid Rock, Kiss, Gretchen Wilson, Rascal Flatts, Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood, Diamond Rio, and many others.

The pair produced and directed national commercials, music videos, and internationally distributed concert video projects for such clients as The Walt Disney Company, ABC Sports, “Live with Regis & Kelly,” “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,” NBC, Warner/Reprise, The RCA Label Group, MCA Records, Arista Records, and the Los Angeles Lakers.

Deaton Flanigen Productions received a handful of prestigious national and regional awards before the two dissolved their partnership a decade ago.

Meanwhile, Deaton had become a two-time Emmy winner with the “Are You Ready for Some Football?” opening for ABC’s “Monday Night Football.” He also produced “Sports Illustrated: 50 Years of Beautiful” on NBC, as well as the “Soul2Soul” Las Vegas residency for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in 2013. He was also executive producer of “The Passion” (2016) with Tyler Perry for Fox Broadcasting.

Long fascinated by the Rolling Stones, and their country-styled “Wild Horses” and “Dead Flowers” roots, and with a deep love of authentic country music (alongside an appreciation of all things Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette) that hearkens back to growing up on the music of Hank Williams, Ray Price, Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Jerry Lee Lewis and other stars of the Grand Ole Opry from a young age, it was a natural moment for Deaton to come up with the concept of the Rolling Stone country music tribute album, “Stoned Cold Country,” released on March 17th on BMG.

After all, hearing Ronnie Milsap’s electrifying 1976 live cover of “Honky Tonk Women,” Deaton had believed it to be, “one of the greatest country music songs of all time.”

“Stoned Cold Country” was born over “three bottles of white wine” at Angelini Osteria in Los Angeles with  BMG CEO Hartwig Masuch as Deaton’s dining companion. Masuch enthusiastically approved the album’s concept.

Over the course of the “Stoned Cold Country” sessions, Deaton worked intensely with artists, and with an army of nearly 70 Nashville studio musicians, including associate music producer and guitarist Danny Raderl, and Chuck Leavell, the Stones’ longtime piano player, in shining a light on the Stones’ country influences as well as on country music at large, but more specifically on some of its most maverick contemporary artists.

Featuring Eric Church, Steve Earle, Little Big Town, the Zac Brown Band, Brooks & Dunn, Brothers Osborne & The War And Treaty, Lainey Wilson, Jimmie Allen, Elvie Shane, Ashley McBryde, and Elle King, the 14-track set is a raucous salute to the British group’s 60th anniversary.

Early releases from “Stoned Cold Country” have included: Jimmie Allen’s impassioned rendition of “Miss You”; “Sympathy for the Devil” by Elvie Shane; “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by Lainey Wilson; and “It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It)” by Brothers Osborne & The War And Treaty.

While Deaton shrugs off talk about his tenure as country music television’s most storied name and downplays the “buzz” of getting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to sign off on the “Stoned Cold Country” project, you can tell he truly loves what he does.

You are a guy who could easily wear a T-shirt proclaiming, “Reinvent yourself!”

Thank you. I appreciate that comment because that is all that I’ve tried to do. I think part of the reinvention is to just always move creatively and be doing stuff that I have never done before.

How have you been able to do all the things you’ve done in your career while being a husband and raising three children?

I’ll tell you how. I don’t have hobbies. Sometimes I use that as a joke, but it’s true. I don’t play golf. When my kids were growing up, I made sure that I went to all of their baseball and football games. My son is a drummer, so I was always going to buy him another piece of his drum set. So it is about family, and it is about the work because what I do, I love more than anything. I love our (country) community, and I can’t remember a day, even when I was a kid, that I didn’t always know what I wanted to do. The day after I graduated from high school, my bags were packed. My car was packed.

Where did you go?

I drove to Nashville. I wanted to be here.

You really wanted to get out of Fayetteville, North Carolina?

I did. They called it Fayettenam back in those days. I grew up near the military base (Fort Bragg). I loved growing up in Fayetteville.

During the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the 500 block of Hay Street in Fayetteville was notorious for crime. Bragg Boulevard was populated by strip clubs and crime was rampant in the ’70s and ’80s. Fayetteville rappers J. Cole (with “Land of Snakes” in 2013), and Morray (with “Trenches” in 2021) have each referenced Fayettenam.

Growing up in North Carolina, your father worked in radio and television. He was a celebrity anchor at WECT-TV, Channel 6 in Wilmington. He hosted a Friday night country music show that Grand Ole Opry cast members would perform on if they were in the area.

That’s true. My father, when we lived in Wilmington, North Carolina, did have a country music television show on Friday nights. Back then there were what four television stations? The major networks and PBS. People didn’t necessarily know the difference between something that was local, and a show that was all over the country. Well, he had “The George Deaton Show” every Friday night, and I was on the show as a square dancer.

Artists at the time came up through the touring system.

There was very little routing back then. They just booked the dates and got on the bus.

At 6, you sat alongside Jerry Lee Lewis as he performed. At 12, you were running around backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. From an early age, you met all of the country artists of the day.

I was. I grew up with these great artists and although I was little, I was going backstage and hanging out with the artists. I met Buck Owens and Charley Pride. I’m sure part of me was a nuisance. I had questions. It was just fascinating to me, meeting the stars of the Grand Ole Opry. Back then the Grand Ole Opry laid out an annual event with pictures, and cards with who the artists were, I collected those.

My favorite country album of all time is still Buck Owens (and his Buckaroos) “Live at Carnegie Hall” (which reached #1 on the Billboard Country Album chart in 1966). I think the reason is that the sound of that record, it reminded me of being back in the (TV) studio when I was little. And that is what it sounded like then.

In his Allmusic review of the “Live at Carnegie Hall” album, critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote: “Owens and the Buckaroos had to deliver a stellar performance, and they did—the group sounded like dynamite, tearing through a selection of their classic hits with vigor. Several decades removed from the performance itself, what really comes through is how musical and gifted the Buckaroos were, particularly Don Rich.”

In the past, I worked as a researcher for Canadian actor and radio host Don Harron who was a member of the “Hee Haw” cast. I spent considerable time around Buck Owens during a 10^th anniversary “Hee Haw” show in 1978.  He took a shine to me because of a story I told him about meeting “Dangerous” Don Rich who had passed away only four years earlier in a motorcycle accident.

In 1969, I had met the Buckaroos in Toronto at the Canadian National Exhibition. At Don’s request, I had walked him and the Buckaroos, all in their Nathan Turk Western-wear suits, through the midway to lunch on a Canadian specialty, peameal bacon (a wet-cured, unsmoked back bacon made from trimmed lean boneless pork loin rolled in cornmeal).

I wish Larry that Don was in the…Don needs to be in the Country Hall of Fame in my opinion. He is the greatest high-harmony singer of all time.

What’s telling about the country music artists of the 1960s and 1970s is that so many of them were adept at working on television, which was a primary way for them to become better known. Other than appearing on the Grand Ole Opry radio show, there were all these regional country television shows around America, such as “Flatt and Scruggs’ Grand Ole Opry Show,” “Billy Walker’s Country Carnival,” “The Arthur Smith Show,” “The Porter Wagner Show,” and “Town Hall Party,” as well as “The Spade Cooley Show.” and “Cal’s Corral.” in Southern California.

Country artists of the 1960s and 1970s knew how to work TV cameras, and they knew about studio lighting. They were able to perform in one take and be on their way.

Yes. If you think about it Larry, as I said my dad had the regional television show every Friday night. So if the Grand Ole Opry stars were in town or if some of them were traveling through, they always made sure that they were on the show. But if you also remember back then, and I don’t know if people remember, within those years there was a lot of television going on. There was “Pop Goes The Country” hosted by Ralph Emery, and “The Porter Wagner Show, and I don’t know if you remember a show in Charlotte, North Carolina, there was Arthur Smith, and he had a television show. “The Arthur Smith Show” (circa the 1960s, filmed at WBTV).

Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith was best known for “Guitar Boogie” (aka “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”) which he recorded in 1945. An early example of hillbilly boogie, it was a link between 1940s Western swing and honky-tonk and 1950s rockabilly. By 1949, “Guitar Boogie” sold over three million copies, and reached #8 on the Hot Country Songs chart, and #25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

In 1957, Smith founded the first commercial recording studio in the Southeast In Charlotte. He produced radio and television shows for a number of other artists, and he produced and hosted his own radio program, “Top of the Morning,” which was syndicated for an unbroken span of 29 years. In the 1970s, Smith produced a weekly, 30-minute program syndicated in more than 90 TV markets at its peak.

There were all of these syndicated country shows at the time. Bill Anderson had his television show (“The Bill Anderson Show,” which was taped in Canada and Nashville in the mid-60s.) Television for artists back then, that was the way to get to people. I remember when I was a kid I would go to a gymnasium in a high school to see Buck Owens. It wasn’t like they were playing big huge arenas, but they could get to people by the way of television. I love seeing all of those old shows and all those artists.

A lot of TV talent has come from Nashville. Few people today talk about producer, music arranger, and music director Bill Walker.

Right, all that stuff for TNN.

He was Johnny Cash’s musical director (for ABC-TV “The Johnny Cash Show” which ran from June 7, 1969, to March 31, 1971. When Johnny Cash would say, “Goodnight Bill Walker,” the camera would zoom down to Bill Walker.

Australian-born Bill Walker holds a distinctive seat in popular music. In the ‘60s, he worked for RCA Records in South Africa, recording visiting RCA artists from the United States. When Jim Reeves came to South Africa to film “Kimberley Jim,” Walker was hired to write the score.

He also recorded Floyd Cramer, Duane Eddy, and John D. Loudermilk while in South Africa.

You are one of a handful of people I know who has extraordinary respect for heritage country, and a mutual respect for the newer contemporary country artists, particularly the nonconformists.

There was a time when many country radio broadcasters in North America avoided promoting themselves as country. They absolutely steered clear of identifiable country artists while favoring pop country acts.

But I’m like you.

If you are a country fan, you are a country fan; and some of the heritage acts should be considered in the context of being like our aunts and uncles. Neither of us has issues with Americana, bro country,  Country Pop, Country Rock, Rockabilly, Cowboy, or edgy country artists like Hank Williams Jr., Steve Earle, or Eric Church. It is what it is.

Yeah, I agree. I accept all of those. I feel that it’s unnoticed, but country music has always been a lot of things. When I grew up hearing Merle Haggard doing “Working Man Blues” on the radio, it was at the same time you could hear Eddie Arnold doing “Make The World Go Away” or Don Gibson singing “Oh, Lonesome Me.”

We have always had different styles of music under what we call the country music banner. For example, I love listening to Tim McGraw or Chris Stapleton who is an unbelievably incredible vocalist, but I also love Dan + Shay who are equally amazing vocalists. I just love all that, and I feel that we should embrace all that because, as I said, that is what country music has always been.

You’ve worked extensively with Hank William Jr. over the years. I’m a big fan, and I was a friend of his late manager Merle Kilgore. I can remember a time when country radio backed away from “that shit kicker country stuff” to focus more on going uptown toward Country Pop.

Heck, country was always going uptown, aka “Countrypolitan,” back with Ray Price in the ‘60s, and Crystal Gayle and the smooth Nashville Sound in the ‘70s.

Nothing has changed.

Yeah, it’s funny, and it’s interesting. Every time that we start getting away from country music, there is some artist like Ricky Skaggs that turns us back to who we are.

When I was growing up, I didn’t know that Hank Williams Sr. was country. I knew that Ernest Tubb, Ray Acuff, Cowboy Copas, and Kitty Wells were country. But Hank was on Hit Parade stations, and his music was on almost every jukebox in our neighborhood.

Ray Price was in the same vein. He was like that too. Some people didn’t know that they were listening to country music when they were listening to Ray Price or Patsy Cline.

In the 60s, Ray consorted with violins, even recording and touring with small orchestras. Grand Ole Opry executives threw a fit when Ray appeared, but he had a #1 hit in 1970 with Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times,” a song which won him a Grammy, and which returned him to the top of the country charts after a nearly 11-year absence.

You know that it wasn’t until 1996 that Ray Price was brought into the Country Music Hall of Fame? With over 100 country charted hits, he should’ve been inducted years earlier. From his landmark 1956 recording of “Crazy Arms” to such hits as “Faded Love,” “Heartaches by the Number,” and “Release Me,” his contribution to country music is undisputed, despite his Countrypolitan orchestration.

It’s so true. Or Johnny Cash putting horns on “Ring of Fire.” But again the country music genre is so many things. The genre has so many different styles and types of artists. I think that is what makes country music so strong.

Co-written by June Carter, and Merle Kilgore who was also a singer, songwriter, radio host, and actor, Johnny Cash’s 1963 hit “Ring of Fire” was originally recorded in a folk style by Carter’s sister Anita, but Cash liked the song, and in a dream, he heard it with the Mexican-style horns that he incorporated into his version.

Can I say one thing, Larry? You and I are bonded because Merle Kilgore was one of my dearest friends.

Hard to believe Merle has been gone for 17 years. He was a bigger-than-life character. I once went up to see him in Paris, Tennessee, where he was living and working with Hank Jr. We go out to lunch locally to have chicken because his wife Judy had him on a diet. We get to the restaurant, and they had run out of chicken for the day.

(Laughter) That’s funny. You know that I worked with Hank Jr. for 7 years doing the opening for ABC’s Monday Night Football.

That you twice won an Emmy for.

I sure did. Merle Kilgore was one of a kind. There’s nobody like him, close to him since then. Just truly an amazing human being. I loved him,

Merle and I bonded when he was in Toronto attending a TNN function at the Hockey Hall of Fame. We talked of the late country icon Johnny Horton. I then sang him “Johnny Reb” a Confederate soldier’s song he wrote that was popularized by Johnny Horton in 1959.

“Cause you fought all the way, Johnny Reb, Johnny Reb

You fought all the way, Johnny Reb

I heard your teeth chatter from the cold outside

Saw the bullets open up the wounds in your side

I saw the young boys as they begin to fall

You had tears in your eyes, ’cause you couldn’t help at all

But you fought all the way, Johnny Reb, Johnny Reb

You fought all the way, Johnny Reb.”

A revitalized brand identity has been crafted around country music in recent years.

Sarah Trahern, the dynamic CEO of the Country Music Association (CMA) often refers to country music as being “the biggest tent.” Not only has the CMA taken the lead of late in the country sector’s ambitious initiatives addressing racial and gender inequality, and even gender inclusion, but also in better preserving the genre’s legacy.

I love that you pieced Broadway and film star Jennifer Hudson and Chris Stapleton together at the CMA Awards in 2021, performing a medley of Willie Nelson’s “Night Life,” and “You Are My Sunshine” (co-written by Charles Mitchell, and two-time governor of Louisiana, Jimmie Davis) from Aretha Franklin’s catalog.

That was one incredible TV moment.

That was truly incredible. We were blown away by that. Jennifer wanted to meet me when she was doing a screening of (the 2021 film) “Respect” here in Nashville at The National Museum of African American Music. One thing led to another, and I didn’t realize at the time how many country songs Aretha had recorded. So I was like, “There’s a connection.” And that’s how we ended up putting Jennifer and Chris Stapleton together.

Well, after all, your three favorite singers are Tammy Wynette, Ella Fitzgerald, and Natalie Cole. So Jennifer Hudson would be in your sweet spot.

That’s correct. They are, exactly. Those are my three favorites. I can listen to them forever. I’m also sad at the same time because we will never hear them again live. Sadly taking somebody so soon.

There’s something that you said about this (diversity) is what country music has always been at its best.

In the ‘70s, we had Charley Pride, and he was having hit after hit after hit. We also had (a founding father of Chicano rock ‘n’ roll and rock en español) Freddy Fender’s “Before The Next Teardrop Falls.” And we had Tejano with Johnny Rodriguez in the format. And (Cajun) Eddy Raven. We are so much better when we are inclusive which we should be.

In the ‘70s, Latino country singers Freddy Fender and Johnny Rodriguez were embraced as country stars as were, to a lesser degree, Scotty McCreery, Tish Hinojosa. Rick Trevino, Vince Mira, and more recently Lindi Ortega and Ricky Valido are highly visible in the format.

Charley Pride broke into country music in the mid-60s when Jim Crow laws and customs were still present. Black artists, in general, had a tough time of it in entertainment. In 1966, RCA signed Charley who went on to have over 30 #1 country hits, and as many Top 5 country hits. He sold an estimated 70 million records over a 50-year career.

There have only been a handful of Black country stars since Charley, Stoney Edwards, Linda Martel, and Cleve Francis had followings just after Charley. Now there’s African Americans Mickey Guyton, Darius Rucker, Kane Brown, Jimmie Allen, Trini Triggs, Blanco Brown and even Lil Nas X who rose to prominence with his 2019 country rap single “Old Town Road.”

I like today’s country music. We are growing so much. We’ve got the music of Kane Brown, we’ve got Mickey Guyton, and we have all of these great artists that we are just opening up our door to. And, as I said, we are just better when we are so inclusive.

When I grew up crossover hits– considered country by genre but embraced by pop audiences—were common. A lot of country hits blended in with pop and rock hits on Top 40 radio formats.

Patti Page’s “The Tennessee Waltz” in 1950 reached #2 on Billboard’s Country Singles chart, and #1 on Billboard’s Pop Chart for 13 weeks. Patti Page wasn’t stylistically all that different from Patsy Cline, even with her first country hit “Walking After Midnight” in 1957 that reached #2 on the Billboard country music chart, and #12 on its pop chart.

Crossover hits have a long-distinguished history, particularly In the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s as Johnny Cash, Skeeter Davis, Charlie Rich, Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Freddy Fender, B.J. Thomas, Olivia Newton-John, Anne Murray, Kenny Rogers, Glen Campbell, Dolly Parton. Eddie Rabbitt, Linda Ronstadt, and John Denver continually straddled the country pop line.

Few could match Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” as a crossover pop hit. It topped the Billboard Country chart and reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100.

More recently there’s been country-pop crossovers from Shania Twain, Taylor Swift, Lil Nas X, Florida Georgia Line, Faith Hill, Carrie Underwood, Lady A, and Sheryl Crow to name a few.

As country shifted back in recent years to its roots with Chris Stapleton, Dierks Bentley, Luke Combs, Brothers Osborne, Jason Aldean, Ashley McBryde, Jimmie Allen, Thomas Rhet,t and others, genre-defying hook-ups have become increasingly popular.

Among the recent hookups are: Dan + Shay who teamed up with Justin Bieber, Maren Morris with Hozier, Billy Ray Cyrus and Lil Nas X, and Kane Brown teaming up with Marshmello.

Multi-generational, and cross-genre hookups continue to be evident at country award shows.

Alanis Morissette, Lainey Wilson, Ingrid Andress, Madeline Edwards, and Morgan brought the house down  at the CMT Music Awards on April 2^nd with a rendition of the 1995 “Jagged Little Pill” confessional hit “You Oughta Know.”

Also Carly Pearce joined Gwen Stefani for a spirited performance of No Doubt’s 1995 classic, “Just a Gir,” and the Black Crowes joined Darius Rucker for a raunchy version of their 1990 hit, “She Talks to Angels.”

While the “Stoned Cold Country” album was born from a restaurant meet-up in Los Angeles with BMG CEO Hartwig Masuch, it helped that BMG is also the publishing company for Rolling Stones’ main songwriters, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards. Nevertheless, the album ended up with only three BMG-affiliated artists, Lainey Wilson, Jimmie Allen, and Elvie Shane.

BMG was so supportive. I asked, “What rules do I have to play by?” They were like, “None. We want you to make the best record that you possibly can.”

So I tried really hard to get artists that had the same DNA as the Rolling Stones and as Mick and Keith. That’s hard to do because, of course, they are one of a kind. Certainly, Eric Church does things his way. He’s an outlaw. He’s a modern-day outlaw and he doesn’t conform.

All of those artists in their own way are trailblazers.

Lainey Wilson, for example, moves to town (Nashville) and lived in a camper trailer (outside of a recording studio) for 10 years, and now they call her “an overnight success.” But it’s an “overnight success” that took 10 years.

Nobody is an overnight success in Nashville. It is one of the toughest entertainment centers in the world. During the early 1980s, for example, Randy Travis was rejected by every major record label in Nashville. He worked at The Nashville Palace as a cook and singer, performing under the name Randy Ray. He recorded an independent album “Live at the Nashville Palace,” which eventually led to a deal with Warner Bros. Records Nashville.

Right. Garth Brooks also got turned by every label in town.

Lynn Shults, Capitol Nashville’s VP of A&R. specifically extended Garth a “handshake” agreement on the evening of May 11, 1988, after his showcase at Nashville’s famed Bluebird Café.

“I don’t remember what his first song was,” said Shults later, “but I’m pretty sure the second one was ‘If Tomorrow Never Comes.’ Garth just blew me away.”

At the time. Shults had worked closely with Kenny Rogers, Anne Murray, Crystal Gayle, and Tanya Tucker.  Ironically, his tenure with Brooks was short-lived. At the end of 1989, Capitol came under new management and Shults, Capitol Nashville president Jim Foglesong and others were fired.

Lynn became director of country operations for Billboard where I met him.

You know I produced Garth’s stadium dates in Dublin, Ireland this past year.

Garth Brooks says his five Irish gigs at Croke Park last September were the first time he ever sold out all of his concerts in one country. Garth was due to play five concerts in Dublin in 2014, but the gigs were canceled following a licensing dispute with locals around the venue and the local authorities.

It’s important to emphasize that “Stoned Cold Country” is not just about superstar country artists.

It wasn’t important to me the level of superstar that you are (for the record), that is not what this is about. It was trying to find the right artists that are kind of the same cloth as the Rolling Stones. Those artists, whether they are famous or whether they are not famous; or whether or not they would still be playing in clubs, and dive bars, it’s all about music. That is what they are about. They are not about the publicity machine. They are just real artists, and I felt that it was important that we did that (approach) with the group of artists that we have.

One of my favorite artists is Elvie Shane who covered “Sympathy for the Devil” on “Stoned Cold Country.” I just love his ode to blue-collar workers, “Forgotten Man,” which fits alongside Hank Williams Jr. heartland rockers like “A Country Boy Can Survive.”

Well, I love Elvie. (Before the album) I didn’t know Elvie. What happened was Clarence Spalding, who is Elvie’s manager, and one of my dearest friends, called me, and he was like, “What about putting Elvie on this record?” So one weekend I was like, “I’m going to listen to everything that Elvie has got out.” So I went and listened to everything, and I told Clarence, “Absolutely, Elvie should be on this record.”

So we cut “Sympathy for the Devil,” and it was just a great session.

So 10:30 at night, I’m at home, and I get a call from Elvie. And this just goes to show you what kind of artist, and what kind of person that Elvie is. I thought Elvie was calling to talk to me about the session or about something that he wants to do or that he wants to re-record something. It wasn’t any of that. He called me, and said, “I love the spirit of this record and this whole album. I know who you have on it, but there is one artist that I feel you should put on there.” I was like, “Who is that?” He said, “Steve Earle.” I said, “Absolutely. And first of all, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. I love Steve Earle. ‘Guitar Town’ (1986) changed Nashville. If you send me his number, I will call him tomorrow.”

And that is what I did.

Recording “Angie” is a bit of a change-up for Steve Earle, but like every artist on the album,  he put all his love into his performance.

I also loved what Maren Morris did with “Dead Flowers.” I’ve been a fan of hers since the single “80s Mercedes” (2016). Have you ever heard Scottish singer Frankie Miller’s version of “Dead Flowers?”

I have not, actually. I have not.

Watch it on YouTube. Frankie Miller does the finest version of “Dead Flowers” I’ve ever heard.

I will definitely listen to it.

In the 1999 BBC Television documentary “Stubborn Kinda Fella” Rod Stewart states that Frankie Miller, “was the only white singer to have brought a tear” to his eye.

Among the core musicians on “Stoned Cold Country” are Danny Rader (acoustic guitar), Kenny Greenberg (electric guitar), Michael Rhodes (bass), Greg Morrow  (drums), and Mike Rojas (keyboards).

There are a couple of surprises, including Willie Nelson’s long-time sideman Mickey Raphael on harmonica for ““Miss You” with Broken Bow multi-tasker Jimmie Allen. That’s a real change-up.

It’s different on every track, but we had the great Michael Rhodes playing a lot of the bass tracks (plays on roughly half of the album’s songs). We had Gordon Mote playing piano on a bunch of tracks. We had Danny Rader playing on almost everything. He’s a great guitarist. And on “Shine A Light” with Koe Wetzel, that’s Chuck Leavall on piano.  What a great guy. He’s just the best.

We recently lost one of the good ones, Michael Rhodes.

Bassist Michael Rhodes–a 10-time Academy of Country Music Bass Player of the Year award-winner–died at his home in Nashville on March 4th. He was 69 years old. Over the course of a four decade-plus career, Rhodes worked with the likes George Strait, Dolly Parton, the Chicks, Kenny Chesney, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Wynonna Judd, Alan Jackson and Willie Nelson. Outside country, he worked with Lionel Richie, Stevie Nicks, Joss Stone, Brian Wilson, and India.Arie.

What studios did you work in?

We used Southern Ground Studios for a lot of the sessions. We also worked at Blackbird Studios, Neon Cross, Starstruck Studios, East Iris Studios, and Sound Emporium Studios, all in Nashville at The Castle Recording Studios in Franklin.

In recording “Stoned ColdCountry” I know you listened to the original Rolling Stones’ recordings over and over because the essence of the original Stones’ tracks are most certainly captured. Who did the arrangements?

I came in with the arrangements, basically. I always get inspiration from music. I say this a lot, that the music gives me the answers for everything. Even if I am writing a story. Whatever I am doing, if I can listen to some music, then I can immediately create something.

In recording “Stoned Cold Country” you didn’t use any click tracks.

I will tell you this is how I wanted to do it. I wanted everybody in the room at the same time. I wanted all of the musicians playing together. I wanted no click tracks. I would normally come in with a loose arrangement. I say loose, for example, I knew exactly how I wanted to start the track on “Sympathy for the Devil.” I knew exactly how to start  “Angie.” I wanted to start with that 8-bar piano intro before I got to the signature riff of that record.

You started playing trumpet in the 4^th grade You then grew up playing guitar in bands, and orchestras, and then you were in garage bands all through high school. So that’s your background in stripping down the arrangements for these Rolling Stones songs. Then you lived with them for a while in order to seamlessly cut across country and rock while respecting music that is practically the soundtrack to your school years.

I can tell.

My wife Anya had an advance of the album and she wanted me to hear it on a Friday night. I said, “I don’t want to hear anyone from Nashville covering the Stones. Don’t do this to me, please.”

(Laughter).

I started off with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” with Arkansas two-time CMA recipient Ashley McBryde who became an Opry member in December. Hearing the track,  I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. But I can’t really see Brooks & Dunn doing  ‘Honky Tonk Women.’ Well, whoa, it really works, and I hear hearing Ronnie Milsap’s take that influenced you, and away I went through the entire album.

Afterward, I thought, “Someone very creative, someone very sharp, and someone who is a big music fan put this together.”

Well, thank you so much. That’s what I did. The arrangements came from me. I would live with the song, think about our approach to it, and how I could make each song a tribute to them (the Rolling Stones) but make it our own, and make it perfect for that artist.

The most challenging task of the album was crossing country and rock while tracks had to still fit under the country umbrella. 

It had to be country. I wanted to make a real honest-to-goodness country record. I wanted to make sure that three cuts into the album the listener would be going, “Oh my goodness, this is a real unapologetically country album.” This is why I wanted everybody in the room together. I would get a circle, and I’d say, “This is what we are doing. Here is what I am seeing, and here is the breakdown of the arrangements.”

So I would write these songs down and arrange them.

But I was then able to let them bring their incredible musical expertise because the greatest musicians in the world are here in Nashville.

For example, I told (pedal steel guitarist) Paul Franklin, “Paul you are just as important on ‘Wild Horses’ as Little Big Town. The tone from the first downbeat needs to be you. We need to hear that from you. The moaning and the wailing of this, we need to set this up as a country record.” All of those great musicians have ownership over this album, and ownership over what they are playing.

Upfront, I’d almost certainly consider “Dead Flowers” and “Wild Horse” being country. I’d know I could shape “Angie” to be country. But the other songs, I wouldn’t be too confident about their foundations to support as country.

Before the sessions did you have songs picked out? 

Yeah, I did. That was the daunting task at the beginning of the process. How do you take all of this great music that they did? And, of course, some stood out. That we knew we were going to do. That already had country overtones to them. I figured out the 14 songs that I wanted to do, and most of the time I would hear the song, and I’d also hear that artist singing that song. Almost 95% of the record when I called the artist to be on the album, I  had the song. So when I made the invite to have Eric Church be part of the record, it came with, “I want you to do ‘Gimme Shelter.’”

The Rolling Stones have been so important to Eric Church. He has said that when he was nobody, and just playing guitar in front of 10 people, he got more tips when he played ‘Honky Tonk Women.”

There was only a couple that I left open-ended. One was the Zac Brown Band.

Only because musically, they can do anything.

They can do anything. I felt maybe there’s an obscure album cut that Zac might want to do. I called him, and I said, “Zac we need to figure out what it is you are going to do on the Stones’ record before you leave town because these songs are getting snapped up.” He said, “Let me think about it, and I will call you tomorrow.” He called back five minutes later, and he said, “I want to do ‘Paint It Black.’” As soon as he said it, I was like, “Oh my goodness. Oh goodness gracious.”

You and Lainey Wilson went back and forth on four or five songs, and then had a false start, first recording “Get Off Of My Cloud” before switching to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Right. That’s exactly right. Lainey and I got together and started talking about Stones’ songs because she’s so much fun. She mentioned “Get Off of My Cloud,” and you know what? It’s good. She sounds great, the band sounds great with what we wanted to do. But I had about 11 or 12 of the songs done, and I started to figure out the sequencing of the album. Every time I got through the sequencing, I couldn‘t figure out a place to put that song. The reason why I couldn’t find a place was that I couldn’t make it country enough.

It’s interesting about that that whole (1964-65) era of “Get Off of My Cloud,” and “Time is On Your Side,” I realized that is the era that I needed to let that be what it is. I felt that trying to make any of those songs country was going to be trying too hard.

When I called Clarence Spalding, I said, “Hey man, I think you are right. Elvie Shane would be great for this record. He is the Stones. He’s the spirit of the Stones. I love his music. Let’s do it.” Clarence said, “Well, he wants to do ‘Sympathy for the Devil.” And I was like, “Great.”

But for the rest of the record, when I called and asked them to be part of the project, it came with, “This is the song that I want you to do.”

Joining the Country Music Association board in 1996, and serving 9 years (1996, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006), put you among the grownups in country.

Founded in 1958, the Country Music Association (CMA) is the premier trade association of the country music industry. Representing professionals making a living in country music globally, the organization is dedicated to expanding country music around the world through a number of core programs and its three annual television properties—“The CMA Awards,” “CMA Fest” and “CMA Country Christmas.”

Eventually, you were made the chairman of the TV broadcast committee from 2001 until 2004.

You are right. When I got on the board I was among some of the greatest people that had ever worked in this town. Connie Bradley, Kitty Moon Joe Galante, Donna Hilly, Bruce Allen, Larry Fitzgerald, and Merle Kilgore were on the board. All of these people who I would call the titans of our industry. People that I looked up to. I knew what their place was. I knew how they could contribute. The question I had to figure out was how do I contribute? And it came into clear vision rapidly fast in that we had had Fanfair at the original Nashville Fairgrounds, and it was at a place where we either had to grow it, or we had to get rid of it. The board decided to grow it and moved it over to the stadium, and changed the name (in 2004) to the CMA Music Festival.

The CMA renamed the event to the CMA Music Festival in order to change negative perceptions, embrace the CMA brand, and expand its appeal.

You pitched to make the CMA Music Festival into an annual television broadcast, and Fitzgerald Hartley Company co-founder Larry Fitzgerald argued that you should produce the “CMA Music Festival” TV show, and the other CMA board members agreed. The “CMA Music Festival” was your first network show. So you started producing the festival, and then you signed on as executive director of the “CMA Awards” in 2007. You went on to create the annual “CMA Country Christmas” show in 2010.

But part of that first change was that it addressed my contribution to the CMA. And that was trying to get the CMA Music Festival to sell as a network television broadcast. So I went down there the second year with a camera and shot a five-minute sizzle (reel) of what the Festival is. You can’t describe what it is. You can only feel it or see it. Then (attorney) Joel Katz, Charlie Anderson (then chairman of the CMA Board), Ed Benson (then CMA executive director), and I played the sizzle reel to CBS, and they brought it. I didn’t know at the time that was going to be my entry into producing television. I wasn’t doing that for that reason. I was doing it because I was trying to find a place to contribute. It was later on that the board decided that I should be the producer as well which changed my life. But that was never my intention. My intention was, “Man, I’m on here with Joe Galante, Merle Kilgore,  Bruce Allen, Donna Hilly and Connie Bradley. I know what they contribute but what can I contribute? That was my mindset and that’s how the “CMA Music Festival” was born as a television show.

The 2021 edition of The Country Music Festival did not take place due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

To mark the 50th anniversary of The Country Music Festival, it returns to downtown Nashville June 8-11, 2023, and features hundreds of artists performing across multiple stages, and there are nightly concerts at Nissan Stadium with Jason Aldean, Jimmie Allen, Dierks Bentley, Luke Bryan, Eric Church, Luke Combs, Dan + Shay, Jordan Davis, HARDY, Tyler Hubbard, Cody Johnson, Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town, Ashley McBryde, Tim McGraw, Old Dominion, Jon Pardi, Carly Pearce, Keith Urban, and Lainey Wilson. Also, there is Fan Fair X inside Music City Center.

Along the way, you produced “Sports Illustrated: 50 Years of Beautiful” on NBC, as well as the “Soul to Soul Las Vegas” residency for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. You were executive producer of “The Passion” for Fox Broadcasting, and you now serve as executive producer of the Billboard Music Awards on NBC.

After a couple of years working at Ridder Broadcasting’s ABC affiliate WKRN-TV 2, in the news and then marketing department, shooting all their promos and doing marketing, you and George Flanigen launched Deaton Flanigen Productions which did lots of commercials and marketing promos for syndicated TV shows, and an estimated 500 music videos for such artists as Martina McBride, Faith Hill, Alabama, and Diamond Rio. You two made their feature film directorial debut in 2018 with “Benched.”

George and I don’t have a business anymore, but he’s still my brother. We shuttered that company over 10 years ago, but our names will always be together. It will always be. He’s my brother.  We still work together. He worked a lot with me on the CMA stuff and, of course, George is one of the producers of the Grammys (2019). He is still my brother, and I love him to death.

With Deaton Flanigen Productions, you won two CMA Video of the Year awards. One for “Independence Day” with Martina McBride,  and one for “Believe” with Brooks & Dunn.

Our mutual friend songwriters Gretchen Peters largely credits the video of “Independence Day” for the song’s success, It’s a chilling video. What a freaking video. Still tears me up.

Thank you.

You worked with my close friend Bruce Allen with Martina who he was managing.

I sure did. How’s Bruce doing? Bruce is the best. Talk about another character, but he will make you laugh. He is hilarious. I love Bruce Allen. He’s still managing (Michael) Bublé, right? And didn’t he manage Anne Murray?

Yes.

I tried to get Anne for one of the CMA Awards. It might have been the 50^th, but I heard she’s not doing anything anymore.

The 50th CMA Awards, held on November 2, 2016, at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville honored country music’s rich history, and included a big handful of heritage country artists.

From what I understand its rehearsal was the worst rehearsal of all time, leaving you praying, “Please, Lord, let us get through this.” You never finished the opening segment with Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood as hosts, along with Roy Clark, Charley Pride, Clint Black, Alan Jackson, Dwight Yoakam, and Charlie Daniels from beginning to end during rehearsals.

You were balancing a lot.

I was. The thing that was the most daunting for me was that opening. As you know how I grew up. I grew up with these great artists. I got to meet Buck Owens. I got to sit with Jerry Lee Lewis when I was little. And Charley Pride. It was so important for me to get this right. It wasn’t just about doing a TV show. We were representing the last 50 years of country music.

And the last 50 years of your own life. You tell the story of being at the Opry one night right before Charlie Daniels passed away in 2020 at the age of 83. He was on last, and you were going to leave but didn’t. You will always have that memory of him just tearing up “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

It is true.

The award-winning “Forever Country” 50th Anniversary music video has garnered more than 18 million views.

During rehearsal, it was a train wreck for the opening. A lot of these artists hadn’t been on TV for a long time. Roy Clark, and Charley Pride. Then we had Dwight Yoakam, and Alabama. It was a huge opening. We never could get through the whole thing. I was like, “Oh my goodness, I have really bit off more than I can chew this time.” I remember walking onstage with my head down, thinking, “What in the world are we going to do?” And I hear a voice, and it’s Vince Gill saying, “Looked better on paper, didn’t it?” I looked up, and he is laughing, and he says, “Robert, It’s going to be alright. We’ll get it all together.”

You never did get through the entire opening in rehearsal.

The only time we ever finished it from beginning to end was live on air. We got through the entire thing, and we were announcing the opening monologue, and I burst out crying. I just sat there and sobbed at the producer’s table because this is what my whole professional career was leading up to was this moment, and it was incredibly difficult, but it ended up being beautiful. I was like, “I did it. I did it exactly how I wanted to do it. I honored these people, and I honored these people the way that I wanted to honor them.”

At that precise moment, you may have wondered how your mentors, Irving Waugh, (who served as executive producer of the CMA Awards), and longtime Grammy director Walter Miller would have done it.

(Laughing) That is true. You know what? I do that all of the time, and still to this day I will ask “What would Walter Miller do?” Here’s the thing about Walter. If there was a Mount Rushmore for live television Walter Miller would be on it. Robert taught me everything that I know about doing live TV. Even that it is professional to end on time. To go over 30 or 40 minutes, I’m like, “That’s not what Walter taught me. You go off on time.”

Without Walter, without his blessing, there’s no way I would be doing what I am doing today. There’s no way. I owe him. Walter Miller changed my life, and I owe him for it.

I only met Irving a couple of times. I don’t know if he’s in the Country Music Hall of Fame, but he should be.

Irving Waugh knew country music backwards and forwards, and from the beginning. He’d started at WSM radio in the 1940’s, and eventually transitioned to the CMA where he was instrumental in bringing country music to television. Waugh was the executive producer of the CMA Awards until 1993, and there is a special CMA Award named after him specifically, even though he’s not in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

To wrestle, as you did, Alan Jackson,  Dierks Bentley, Jon Pardi, Carrie Underwood, and Lainey Wilson together for a surprise performance at the 56th Annual CMA Awards on Nov. 9, 2022, you deserve a wrangler award just for that.

Is that an organizing skill that you learned from your early days in Nashville working at WKRN-TV 2?

I think I learned that my whole life. Loving the music bandits was always about putting on a show. I always wanted to put on a show. Everything that I love is all related to music, television and movies. I’ve got my 100,000 hours in as you do.

Well, I’m older than you. I’m 75. You are 51. I’m not a kid. But I have adrenaline.

Well, when was the last interview that you did that somebody brought up the “Pop Goes The Country” TV show? I love having YouTube these days because I can think of any artist, and go back and see them perform. I can pull up Tammy Wynette. I love being able to go back and look at all of those shows. And I learn something all of the time. Even if I go back, and I watch the Johnny Cash summer replacement show, I learn something about how they accomplished their television. Where they put their cameras. What kind of lensing did they use? What kind of lighting did they use? You can learn something from all of that. It is what I love doing. I’m blessed because I am working with the artists that I love.

“The Johnny Cash Show” began as a summer replacement for ABC’s “Hollywood Palace” in June of 1969. It did so well that it was given a primetime slot the following January.

A country TV series from the ‘80s barely mentioned today is the Sid and Marty Krofft-produced music-variety series, “Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters” which was filmed at the Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood. The show played off the success of Barbara Mandrell’s fast-exploding country career and also featured her younger sisters, Louise and Irelene.

Among its guests were Dolly Parton, Larry Gatlin, Charley Pride, Paul Anka, Bob Hope, the Statler Brothers, Marty Robbins, Alabama, Ricky Skaggs, and Steve Wariner.)

People thought that show ran for years but it only ran for two years (on NBC Nov. 1980 and June 1982) with an audience of millions each week.

Despite its strong ratings, the only reason it went off the air was because star Barbara Mandrell was suffering from exhaustion.

I became very close to Barbara. She would send me a card after the CMA Awards. She would write out what she loved in a very professional way. It was obviously coming from somebody who knew television. I so appreciated those notes from her.

You mentioning Connie Bradley, Kitty Moon, and Donna Hilly earlier underscores the fact that country has long been an industry with incredible woman. I am thinking of the late Jo Walker-Meador, executive director of the Country Music Association from 1962 to 1991, and the late Frances Preston, the Chief executive officer of Broadcast Music, Inc. from 1986 to 2004.

Absolutely. I am so glad you mention it. I am still glad today the women that we have working in our industry. Starting with Frances Preston, Connie Bradley, Kitty Moon, and Jo Walker-Meador who was just the most awesome person. But it continues today. We have Sarah Trahern, CEO of the Country Music Association, and Kerri Edwards who manages Luke Bryan. There’s Martha Earls who manages Kane Brown; and Cindy Mabe who is CEO and chair of the Universal Music Group Nashville (the first woman to hold this title at a major Nashville-based label.)

It’s on and on and on.

The women who make up this industry are the brightest, the most talented of anybody working anywhere. You are touching on a really important thing for me because I was raised by strong women, and I love that about our industry. I think that country music has always led when it comes to that.

A TV special on women with strong country or Nashville ties would be intriguing. Today, there are the women that you mentioned, and also there’s Heather Vassar (VP of marketing, Nashville, EMPIRE), Stacy Blythe (Big Loud Records, senior VP of promotion), Leslie Fram  (SVP of music strategy at CMT), and Katie McCartney (GM, Monument Records) among the women in the country sector representing fields including labels and distribution, management, business management, publishing, live events, branding, rights, and industry associations.

That’s a great idea. I will write that idea up. I agree with you. Here’s the thing. There’s no possible way that I would be talking with you today without Kitty Moon and Connie Bradley. They are the ones that got me on the CMA board. They were the ones that were my champion. Without those women, you and I aren’t having this conversation I don’t think because I wouldn’t have had the career that I have. I owe my career to these women. I am so very glad that you brought that up.

Larry LeBlanc is widely recognized as one of the leading music industry journalists in the world. Before joining CelebrityAccess in 2008 as senior editor, he was the Canadian bureau chief of Billboard from 1991-2007 and Canadian editor of Record World from 1970-80. He was also a co-founder of the late Canadian music trade, The Record.

He has been quoted on music industry issues in hundreds of publications including Time, Forbes, and the London Times. He is co-author of the book “Music From Far And Wide,” and a Lifetime Member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

He is the recipient of the 2013 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, recognizing individuals who have made an impact on the Canadian music industry.

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