Michael McCarty

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome, welcome, welcome back mob left, that's FOD. My guest
today is a longtime friend Michael McCartin, who was the
chief Membership and Business Development officer her SO Camp. Michael,
how are you okay? So explain what's so canny is?
So can is simplistically the Canadian version of ask CAPPA

(00:29):
and bm I. So it's the performing rights organization in Canada. Uh,
it's also now involved in mechanical rights. But that's it's
it's origin. And it was formed from the merger of
KAPPAC and pro can which predecessors and they were literally
asked Captain B and my Canada. Okay, a little bit slower.
So the acronym stands for I'm not even sure, to

(00:49):
be honest with you, it isn't a society, a society
of Canadian authors, uh, composers and music publishers, but it's
not really an acronymicist. Okay. So the word two yeah,
and how well, how long ago do they merge into one?
Something like that? And we'll caused that. Well, I think
it's just a realization that, um, it was inefficient to

(01:10):
have two different organizations. You know, the US is an
anomaly in the world. Right there there aren't many countries
in the world that have more than one p R.
Oh so, uh it was inefficient and uh so I
mean needed scale and uh and get rid of duplication
of efforts. So they emerged and it's been a very
successful thing. Okay, So, since we're talking about a worldwide
business today, can you think of any other country that

(01:32):
has more than one performing rights organizations? I think Brazil
uh legendarily has about ten. Oh really, of course the
US now has four or five exactly we'll get into that. Okay,
what is the genesis of performing rights organizations? Were they
in lockstep with the developments in the US because the
law is not identical, but what is the development? Well, really,

(01:54):
another another substitute term was collective right. So really they've
started as collectives by uh for the rights owners typically
writers and publishers, and uh they knew that they needed
to aggregate their rights together to blanket licensed radio and
and other licensees. So it's really, you know, uh, parallel
to the development of radio and technology that they started. Okay, Now,

(02:17):
the big difference between the US and the rest of
the country is neighboring rights. Correct, Can you explain that
from my audience. Neighboring rights really is the existence of
the performing right in the master recording. So that means
when the master recording, when the recording is aired, broadcast, stream, whatever,
it earns royalties too because it's got its own copyright. UM. Neighboring.

(02:40):
The nuances of why it's called neighboring rights, it's a
European term, but we don't have to get into but
that's basically what it is. We'll get into it if
you know it well. I don't know it that well.
So you stepped in the hole. Let's if you can
climb out of it. So basically the philosophy is the
prime right is the copyright of the song of the composition.
Uh and uh, and neighboring neighboring right was refers to

(03:03):
sort of a secondary right or it's it's it's a
neighbor of it. I did not know that. I thought
it was neighboring right because the country to country they
were neighbors. I don't think so. Okay. So what we're
basically saying is when the record is played, a payment
goes to the copyright holder of the record right, and
it's so can you collect that correct. We we collected

(03:26):
for the composition, not the not the recording recording, Uh,
the sound exchange in the US, right, Uh, Canada RESOUND
which is a collection of other organizations and PPL in
the UK, etcetera. And um. Uh so it's all it's
it's it's a paralleled system that's very similar to the
to the copy I thought that in some countries they
were unified, but they they may be, but not. Okay,

(03:49):
So actually sorry, we just formed a joint venture with
RESOUND to jointly licensed. Uh. What we call general licensing,
um is the bars, restaurants, hotels, that kind of thing. Um.
So that's called in tandem. And so now you in
Canada you get one license if you own one of

(04:09):
those establishments, instead of having two parties coming at you. Okay,
let's assume I'm paying. How do you guys with up
the money? Uh, it's in relation to what what the
license fees or the tariffs are. Okay. Now this is
all controlled by the government in Canada. The government. Uh well,
the government plays a serious role obviously creating the Copyright

(04:30):
Act in the first place. Um. Canada has the Copyright Board,
which is a quasi judicial body that regulates copyright realty
rates and secondary terms. Um. It used to be that
all of our license fees were based on those those
we call them tariffs. It's you know, it's a court case.
You file it and you have hearings and evidence, et cetera.
But since the digital age particularly, we've tried to um

(04:53):
negotiate as many licenses license deals as we possibly can,
rather go to the court of the rateboard, the copyright board,
because it's very long, time consuming, very expensive for everybody. Okay,
but are there terrorists that are established in case you
can't make a deal. Okay, we're there terrorists established for
streaming music services. There are tariffs, yeah, um, but again,

(05:14):
virtually all of our licensee arrangements are are negotiated and
negotiated with the tariff in mind. But there's a lot
of elements that the tariff doesn't talk about, which which
are important to us, are important to the licensees. So
there's incentive to uh to uh to negotiate it. Not
the least of which is it sometimes takes so long
to get a tariff ruled on that the technology is

(05:37):
dead by the time the tariff is settled. So okay,
But just so I understand, they do establish standards. It's
just if you want to argue with those standards, you
would then go to court. Yeah, and increasingly it used
to be that we would go to go to the
Copyright Board file for a tariff, they would make a
decision and that would be it. Then then the next
phase was we have had existing tariffs, we'd say to

(05:59):
the parts, hey, let's instead of US file a revised
tariff or a new tariff, why don't we sit down
and negotiate it. And then most lately a lot of
times we don't even go to the board initially. We
just start the negotiations. The boards always a fallback if
we don't like the way the negotiations are going. Okay,
why don't you explain, because you're the expert, why there's
so many performing rights organizations in the United States? Well,

(06:22):
I think you need somebody who knows more about the
US environment than me. But my understanding is, um, it
all started when ASCAP was declared UH a monopoly and
anti trust in the was authorities, I guess, and you
know my understanding of that is, um, basically, they went
on strike. They didn't like the rates at radio. They
pull the licenses. Radio didn't have the right to play

(06:44):
music anymore. So, uh, they push some buttons in the government.
The government declared them in the monopoly and put them
on antitrust consent decree, and radio said, um, never again
will we rely on one source of repertoire, and so
they start a B M I okay, But recently this
has been a growing area. We have global we have

(07:07):
se sack Okay, what do you think accounts for let's
say I'm an act okay, other than as off company
which will say for a second, which only has a
lead acts signed to it, But to go to ce
SAC or another p r O, what do you think
the motivation would be? Well, look, the the downside of

(07:29):
having so many pierros in the US is that, um uh,
you know, there's so there's it's it's kind of a
dog's breakfast in some ways, and there's and there's a
it's a complexity and a lot of duplication, et cetera.
The upside is this competition. And of course, you know
America is the land of competition. So if you look
at it as a glass half full, um, it gives
writers there's competition for writer's business and each one of

(07:49):
the p r os has their different pitch as to
why they think they're the best, and they make the
pitch and sometimes it's really a lot of times it's relationships. Sometimes,
Uh you know, there's a business side of the pitch.
Um it's uh, you know, I don't I just want
to speak for them, so I don't want to give
their individual pitches. But they've all got compelling pitches, and
they've all got great organizations and great people. Okay, would

(08:09):
be part of the pitch being that I can collect
better than the other people. You know, I've I've seen
every every element played, you know. I mean, I think
they all believe that they're they're the best collectors. They're
all believed that they do at the cleanest, the most
thorough they all believe that they have the best staff.
It can help your career. Um, and um, you know

(08:31):
that's the that's the pitch. And and they're they're great organizations.
I mean you just think how how big they are
and how much money goes through them. Uh, they're you know,
basically the biggest piros in the world. And uh, we
have great relationship with them all. Or what are the
main things that I was brought into so CAN. To
do is to um reverse the situation where over the

(08:51):
years are some of our members had a lot of
a lot of our high earning members had drifted away
and become members of ASKAP and b M I more
than any of them. And uh, you know, we set
out to reverse that because we want Canadians to be
members of so CAN. Uh. The reason I came to
so CAN was I thought it was a great opportunity
to be one of the two or three people with

(09:12):
my hand on the rudder of an organization. I thought
it was extremely important to the ecosystem in Canada, and um,
you know, I could see where the future was going,
and I wanted to try and help make sure that
the institutions thrived and survived. And uh one of the
main ways to do that was to get our members
back and make sure that new new Canadian artists and
writers were we're members of so CAN and wanted to

(09:32):
join so CAN. And it's done a pretty good job
so far, because you know, as you know, Canada's killing
it in music. Um To Toronto arguably is the hottest
music city in the world, and we have almost every
single person coming out of Canada. Now, okay, so what's
your pitch. Our pitch is um, just what we said earlier,
which is, I think we think we're great collectors. We

(09:52):
think we have um, great opportunities when you're at least
started your career to help you connect the dots and
help connect you into the ecosystem. And we're complimentary to
publishers and labels and managers and agents. Okay, let's slow down.
Let's let's just take the top level. I'm a big act,
I'm Canadian act. I'm with b M I R as GAP.
What's your pitch to them? Uh? What I just said,

(10:14):
plus um, you make more money with us, all else
being equal, because we don't charge um for foreign income.
So are all the money coming from outside of Canada?
We don't commission Uh and okay, so b am I
and ask they all commission that? Yeah, okay, And well
how can SO can't get away without commissioning it. It's
just a decision that they made quite a while ago

(10:35):
as an attempt to try and convince people not to leave.
And they said, you know, look at stay here and
we won't commission the money. So just the cost of
it is embedded in the costs of running, so can
we're one of the most efficient p r os in
the world and um, it's it's it's a lot less
costly to administer the foreign royalties and it is the
domestic one. So um and that is because well because um,

(10:58):
uh the foreign p r O of all, we have
already done a lot of the work matching the you know,
the repertoire and so that you know, we get statements
from them and it's it's easier to go through those
than to do all the original matching ourself. I mean,
don't forget. I mean these days, an organization like ours
is we're tracking like two million performances a day now,
so it's pretty it's pretty daunting. And so we think

(11:19):
that we're one of the most advanced in the world.
And in doing all that and that, um, we have
high touch service. We have a whole team of people
who are assigned to UH two members and they have
a personal relationship with them. When we hear quite often
that people really appreciate that. And even if you're a
big star, your business manager really appreciates it. Okay, So

(11:40):
let's say you're collecting in Canada. People always say this,
Oh my record was played whatever, I didn't get paid?
How much is it digitized and accurate to what actually
is being played? So I tell you a funny story. Um,
I was on the board of so CAN for twenties. Wait,
so canon is own by who? It's a it's a
it's a for profit collective owned by its members, and

(12:02):
members are writers and publishers. Even though it's not for profit,
we we try and adopt a for profit mentality in
terms of, you know, not being a stay bureaucracy and
feeling like we have competition, et cetera. But so for
when when when BDS came along? A number of bds
is a service from Nielsen that listens to radio stations.

(12:24):
The computers listen to radio stations that identify the recordings
audio finger putting lections, AM and UM. So when that
first came along, a number of number of from the
board said, hey, so CAN should adopt this because you know,
one of the main complaints you used to hear in
the from about PRS back then wherever whatever country or
that with everybody uses a survey system to figure out

(12:44):
what's being played in radio and how could that possibly
be accurate? So? Um, several years of discussion went on,
and investigations and and finally and there was nothing. There
was no obvious argument why we should do it because
we're gonna we're gonna make any more money. It wasn't
gonna change the license fees coming from radio. It's gonna
cost a lot more money than the survey. It's going
to create a lot more data to handle. And the

(13:06):
only question was whether it was more accurate or not.
And intuitively we all fet I thought it has to
be more accurate. So, um, we hired somebody to study
our survey. And this is back in the Yeah, yeah,
hired somebody to study the survey, and um, they said
your survey is the most accurate in the world amongst
p r o s and that it's accurate within someone

(13:28):
you know that the statistics of it, and um, and
uh so the management is so kind at the time
said see, there's no reason to to the ghost. So
but a number of us, sort of the kind of
younger ones, said, you know what, this is the digital era.
The reason why we have to do it is because
it's stupid not to do it. And that's we said, Okay,
that's gonna think on BDS. And then for a year,
they ran BDS in parallel to the old survey, and

(13:51):
the number one thing they learned by doing that was
that the survey was incredibly accurate. Um now does it
miss onesies and twosies wants? Well, yeah, the surveys do.
So the there is there's no question that the that
UM BDS and and that kind of type of audio
fingerprint technology and digital monitoring is more accurate. Um. But

(14:11):
it's really the long, super long tail. Okay, but it's
cheaper to do and and it also need the startup
costs were heavier. But actually to do it, it's yeah.
And the number one thing that it did for so
CAN was they had to think about how to handle
the orders of magnitude greater amounts of data. So they

(14:31):
set up processes and technology to do that. That when
the digital era came along and you look around the
corner and oh my god, there's a tsunami of data coming.
So can hat was already set up to handle it,
so unlike some of its peers around the world, So
that that was really the number one benefit of doing
that was unintentionally preparing let's go a little bit slower.

(14:54):
I'm a person, I have a song is played on radio?
Once is that tracked A I get to get paid?
It's uh yeah, it's track now get paid and I
will get paid, although one one place won't. We probably
isn't even a penny. Well on radio, no, it's approximately
a dollar. Let's let's let's say it's a dollar. Wait,
one play is a dollar on radio? Yeah, it's really yeah, yeah,

(15:19):
it's probably less than like seventy eight cents or something
like that, but it's yeah, okay. How do you then
extrapolate or do in terms of as you say, restaurants, cafes, etcetera. Yeah,
well those are those are harder, so you know, um
various um. That goes back to the sort of survey mentality, right,
so it's rough justice, it's approximations, and we we try

(15:40):
and figure out um uh well actually these days, some
of the music services that serve those places, they have
the data. Um, they know what's being performed, so we
get that data. In the cases where we don't have
the data, we try and figure out, Okay, this money
that we collect from those licensees has to be paid
out as fairly as possible, as accurately as possible. We
have no data, so let's um, what data can we get.

(16:03):
We can figure out, well, you know, most of them
play popular music, so we'll take that music without their
license fees and we'll put them in the popular music
pools so that people who have music that's likely being
paid played get paid. But increasingly we're doing things like
um experimenting with putting uh you know Shazam BDS type

(16:24):
listening posts into into clubs. Uh. The d M world
and the DJ world are very concerned about accuracy, and
so we're working with them. We have what we uh
working with Pioneer, where their further Cubo service where they
have a they can produce a data stream of the
titles that would be that the DJ's playing. So Pioneer,
what was pioneers motivation? UM? I think they created a

(16:46):
thing called Cubo. I believe it was a social media platform,
and they wanted to know what was being played, say
in Lisbon, so that people dancing in London could see
on their phone what their friends were dancing to and
maybe requested that kind of thing. So they needed that
data stream. So we're really working really really hard to
try and make sure that there's data every single place
music is used we have a lot of big plans

(17:08):
in live because one of our biggest problems in the
same as all the pr os, is getting accurate set
lists from concerts, getting the artists to to to get
them to us. Some places in Europe the promoter is
required by law to produce the set list or not
in North America, so we have to figure out how
to get that set list. So, um, we're we have

(17:29):
a were first pr O in the world to have
a PI platform. So API is Application programming interface, so
it's basically how one platform talks to another and computers
talk and um. So we have a PI s basically
for every capability of our platform, including sending us your
concert stuff. So there's a We built up the APIs

(17:50):
and thinking that would be a third party marketplace would
spring up, that people would have services that they need
to connect with our platform. And sure enough a company
in Calgary came along called Mazuka and they what they
do is they connect all the parties in the live
music ecosystem managers uh to agents, UM, venues, promoters, et cetera.
And they share digital assets about a tour, videos, posters,

(18:13):
uh whatever, the information on the tour and one of
the byproducts, of course, is everything we need to know
to pay a concert, except for the set list. So
they use our A p I s so that you
can using their at Mazooka app. You're an artist or manager, whatever,
you can dial up your catalog out of our of
our database, create a set list and push a button
and send all the concert information to us, including the

(18:34):
set list. And that's really revolutionizing. How how we deal
with the live concerts and successful okay, and venue? Well,
how do they How is that fee established percentage? Well,
unconscious percentage of the box office? Box office is three
in Canada. It's a lot harder than that in some
of European territories and a lot lower than that in

(18:55):
the US. And right, so it's not a flat fee
in the US. Well, you know, of course, in our world,
as you start to peel back layers, it gets more
and more complex. And part of the reason for that
is that, especially in the Copyright Board era, every single
licensee thought that they're different and the rules shouldn't apply
to them. So they would go to the copyright Board,

(19:16):
and the Copyright Board said, okay, we'll make an exception
for you, and and then it just becomes very complex,
but very simplistically, if you have a hard ticket, it's
three percent of the box office. Okay, let's assume I
sell my catalog like Mark is is buying up catalogs.
How does that affect my soul? Can I saw Mark
last night? Actually? By the way, UM, it doesn't affect

(19:39):
it at all. We're do we pay whoever the owner
and uh an and or administrator is so um uh
if catalog changes hands, we just take the hose out
of one plug and put into another. So a writer
can sell hes rights. Uh, great question. So can is
historically um? Uh not allowed that? In the last few

(19:59):
year years, Um, we've liberalized that a lot because realized
that it's a different world now. Um, there's more information
that people have. It was sort of to protect writers from,
you know, bad deals. I guess that would be the
mentality that it was, And now I think it's a
much more sophisticated world. There's more information out there, there's
more advice you can get, there are more people wanting
to buy writers share, and so we have situations where

(20:20):
where we allow it some Every bureau around the world
has kind of a different mixture of of rules around that.
Let's go back to an earlier comment, why is Toronto
such an epicenter of music creativity? Great question. Um, Canada
has always produced a lot of talent. Um, as you know.
And and uh, I think that the sort of perfect

(20:42):
storm that's happening in Toronto right now is a is
a functional a lot of things. I think that, UM,
the the support for Canadian culture that the government introduced
the number of years ago. In fact, this is the
fiftieth anniversary of the Canadian Content Regulations on radio um
profound effect on the ecosie them uh and uh, nowadays

(21:03):
we've got um uh if you look at the people
from Toronto are kind of killing it. So we've got Drake,
the Weekend, Lessia, karash On, Mendez, et cetera. Um, those
are the above the waterline. Part of the iceberg below
the waterline is actually to me a bigger story, and
that is all the producers, beat makers, co writers that
work with them, Like we have eighty members in the
greater Toronto area that are co writers and Drake and

(21:24):
Weekend Records not including Drake in the Weekend. And um
uh the reasons for that are, um, if you look
at all these people killing it. There's there's a number
of things that are have in common. One, they're disproportionately multicultural.
They are disproportionately immigrants or first generation children of immigrants.
It's a specifically in Canada, Toronto, Toronto. Yeah, uh, this

(21:47):
is well, as you know, Canada is a very multicultural
country exactly, but the real big clusters of that are
Toronto and Vancouver. Right, Well, don't I I had a
cab driver once in Toronto said there are more more ethnicities,
more cultures represented in Toronto than any other city in
the world. Yeah. I think there's like a hundred and
three languages or something. And and so these kids, Um uh,
so there's that. There's that. Um like, look the Weekend

(22:10):
for instance, a great example. He's an Ethiopian Canadian. He's
born in Canada as a mother, wasn't He's managed by
a Lebanese Canadian born in Lebanon and an Iranian Canadian
born in Iran. And uh, there's no better example in that.
Um we did, uh my my head of a and R.
Rodney Murphy and i Ax years ago did a made
a word cloud of the artists were talking about and

(22:31):
the beatmaker, co writer, producers and you put it up
in the screen, and um, it's remarkable how multicultural it is.
It's just it's really the okay, it is multicultural. Why
does the multiculturalism uh in gender's success. Um well, I
think that all the usual reasons why immigrant communities, you know,
have the drive, et cetera. But I think in this
case also part of it. One of the reasons for

(22:53):
the direction of the music, which is a big part
of why it's so successful, the direction being a course
hip hop, pop and and related music is because these
kids they grew up um uh, they want to reject
their parents music. Um. Their their their household is not
connected to the historic thread of Canadian culture, so rock
folk whatever that they're not getting that at home. Uh.

(23:14):
And so they get exposed to the music of the
world coming through the major media through the and that's
generally American music, and it's generally hip hop. So they
kind of grew up in a in a more hip hop,
urban music centric environment than than the people they're if
their friends were and their neighbors were. Um. And then
another uh common thing is that they all make music

(23:35):
in the box. Of course that's on the in the computer. Um.
Live instruments play very little bit. Why is that, uh,
an advantage that Toronto has compared to the rest of
the world. I don't think it's advantage compared to the
rest of the world. But there's a huge beatmaking community
in Toronto, I think arguably I say two things that
are kind of bold that you know, maybe there's a
slightly exaggeration, but I don't really think so. UM Toronto

(23:57):
in many ways controls the sound of popular music in
the world today because of all the people were talking
about and success they have, UM and its indisputably the
beat making capital of the world, I think. And one
of the reasons for that is community. And it's a
community amongst the kids that are from these uh immigrant
families and they go and they live in those neighborhoods
or they live in the neighborhoods where um uh you know,

(24:18):
they're passing around mixed tapes and you know, in the
previous generation UM and UH. There's actually a guy named
rich Kid who UH was one of the early doctors
of what was then called Fruity Loops, which is a
digital platform to make music and now called fl Studios.
And and he was a real leader in getting other
kids on the platform and teaching them how to use it.

(24:41):
There's been a couple of organizations, one called the Beat
Toronto Beat Academy, which was started by two women who
saw these young kids around them that we're really talented,
but they might get lost in the street. And it's
kind of like, uh, people in the neighborhood starting a
soccer team or something. They started this thing called the
Toronto Beat Academy and they had beat battles. That was
the primary activity, and but it became a community where

(25:03):
they all shared. Probably ten years ago, so maybe maybe
a bit a bit longer and fat um uh. One
of the founders of it um was in the press
about three or four years ago, uh, and the headlines
were from homeless to Harvard. At one point she was
homeless and she ended up crowd funding herself to Harvard
and UM. So the way the Beat Academy got these
kids into international beat battles that gave them confidence um uh,

(25:26):
you know, connecting to each other, some sort of structure. Uh.
They taught each other tricks, they won most of the
beat battles they entered. UM. And there was another organization
called the Remix Project, which is a project in the
Region Park area in Toronto, which is a challenging area
for kids, and it was intended to keep kids off
the street. And one of the programs there was was

(25:50):
a music program and actually some of Drake's people uh
early on started teaching there and so this became both
these things became farm teams for beat makers and arguably
not to be clear, they get any government support. Um.
The Remix Project might have. Um, we've so candids helps
support these organizations with uh, you know, helping fly people

(26:11):
to beat battles and and that kind of thing, um,
but largely no, but um, we'll give me back to
the government support connection a little while. Um. Anyway, So
that's one of the reasons why it's it's so huge.
So we got you know, Frank Duke's boy one Noah
shebib uh murder beats uh. Dr McKinney, uh Wonda Girl,

(26:33):
one of the greatest female beat makers in the world.
She came from the Beat Academy. And you know it's
just because academy just like an after school program or
is it something where there's actually courses. No, No, it's
kind of like an informal after school program. Yeah. Yeah,
and uh. Um, so so you got that aspect. So
that so you know, modern beat making became a really

(26:56):
big thing in Toronto. And of course you know, all
nothing happened if it wasn't for Drake, But I'll get
to that in a second. So you've got their disproportionately.
Immigrants are children. Immigrants make music in the box. Live
instruments play virtually no role in making the records, and
live they play like sort of a proper role. Um
and uh. They all made it through the internet, either
they became popular with the public first and then got

(27:17):
signed to a deal or vice versa. But the Internet
played an incredibly important role. Don't forget the last two people.
In fact, I think the two biggest music success stories
on fine where Sean Mendez and Ruth b and um uh.
You know, so that's an indicator of how I don't
know why it happened in Canada, not nowhere else, but
it did. Um and uh. Then one of the most

(27:40):
important things is that this is one of the most
mind blowing things to me and had a profound effect
on how I think about the industry now. When I
realized this about five years ago, I was talking again
to Rodney Murphy, my head of an arm. We're analyzing this,
this group of people, and then I realized not a
single one of them played a gig before they were famous.
And you know, especially a country like Canada where the

(28:01):
live you know, grinding out in the clubs and bars
was such a big part of of having a career
and it just blew my mind when I realized that.
And when when when we first started saying this to
people in the business, you have to wait, ripe the
brain matter off the wall and uh. But anyway, so
that those are all common characteristics, right, and um there

(28:23):
was a incredible um uh sort of boiling pot of
water of talent in hip hop and R and B
that was that was kind of bursting at the seams
in Canada for probably ten years that couldn't get out
of the country because, um, the American industry would not
take that Canadian playing that music. Seriously. I spent a

(28:43):
lot of money in my publishing trying to develop that
scene and uh lost most of it. Um and had
a lot of support from my New York and l
A compatriots, but they just didn't think that Canadian could
ever do it. And then that manifests itself in a
million million different ways. Either they said, well it's good,
but it's Canadian, or it's not good, or but what
it really was. It's kind of like Nashville, you know that. Uh,

(29:03):
it's hard for nash people, Nashville people to imagine something
from outside of Nashville working in Nashville. Um. And in
spite this is in spite of the fact that you know,
the Brian Adams of the world and the guests who's
the b t O s and the Rushes had broken
through that barrier in rock music. But the barrier existed,
It really did. And then so somebody had to break
through in hip hop and R and B. So, um,

(29:25):
Drake existed. I think Drake exists because A he's make
a talented and incredibly smart guy, but b because of
the TV show Degrassi. Uh and uh. That's a really
good example of the Canadian support system because there's Canaan
content regulations in television as well. There's a grants just
explain with Canadian content in radio and television. You have

(29:48):
to play a minimum percentage of of your air time
has to be Canadian content. Okay, let's just stop for
one second. In the era of the internet. How important
is that still on radio? Great question, because um, we're
that's okayn, We're really concerned about this because not so

(30:11):
much about radio, because that's long settled in UM. But
it really in many ways this regulation saved Canadian culture
because um, in the you know media eras in the fifties, fifties,
early sixties, UM, Canadians were swamped with American media and
it was very difficult for Canadian voice to be heard

(30:32):
unless you moved to United States and got a record
deal and became famous like a Gordon Lightfoot or nearly
Young or something like that. And UM, so they created
the legislation and fact at that point, UM, Canada was
not a very confident country in terms of its own
identity and um uh, Canadian radio would not play you

(30:53):
because you were Canadian. The guests Who was called the
Guests Who because they tried to put out an independent
record and when the the independent label realized that if
anybody guess their Canadian, they wouldn't play the record. So
they wrote guests Who questioned Mark on the label to
get the discocist the question to to guess it. Make
it turn into a contest and they thought that was
the name of the band, so they had to change

(31:13):
their name of the guest suit. That's how bad it was. Um.
And so uh, you know, you fast forward to now
and and we have all this incredibly healthy ecosystem, very
much partly because of that Canaan content regulations. UM. But
um it's we think there's a real discover ability problem
in the digital area. So I'll get to that, back
that in the second. But with Degrassi, so there was
conconading content regulations on television as let's talk about the

(31:37):
development of Degrassi and how that happened with the government, etcetera. Yeah,
So um it was created by um uh Lenna Skis
Skyler and her husband Steven Stone, who was a well
known music attorney, and um, they wanted to create a
television show that um was uh positive role uh for
kids and not the usual entertainment bs and talked about

(32:00):
real issues the kids really wanted to know about and
talked about at school and and and counter to school.
So um, there's a very healthy grant system to make
television programs in Canada. So they got some grants and
they just just just because I live in the US, obviously,
you have these grant systems, you're supported by the government.
How does the average Canadian feel about paying taxes to

(32:23):
support that? Um, I don't see or hear anybody's talking
about that. I mean, certainly, when when the legislation first
came in, the content legislation first came in, and then
when the grant systems propped up popped up shortly after that,
there was a lot of people saying that. But they
take it for granted now that that that's what the
system is. And and it's been a very just because
we live in the United States, this is being need about.

(32:45):
What is the top tax rate in Canada right now?
Income tax? Well, I'm not an accountant, but it's more
than it is more than. And also although Trudeau was
just re elected, Uh, there is some conservative pushback and Canada,
what do you think that temperature of the country is
right now? Well, you know, we obviously see what goes

(33:07):
on in US and UK, etcetera. And um, there's Uh,
there was a sort of a more conservative movement, as
you said, but and it resulted in in Justin Trudeau
having minority government. Um, so they didn't they didn't. It
wasn't a change in government, So you're probably with every
minority government, you're gonna see probably more governing from the middle.
So there probably will be a swing towards more towards

(33:30):
the middle of Canada. But don't forget the left right
in middle in Canada totally different than the US. Um.
The US generally is I think a much more conservative
country and and uh um, you know, some of our
more left winging went left wing. Uh political leaders over
the generations might have been considered communists if they were
in the United States, and some of the more right

(33:50):
wing people would have considered being considered middle of the road,
you know. Um, But that's that's just a general just
just before we get back to the grassy. The fact
that Canada is such a cultural impact around the world,
has that ultimately affected the feeling that, uh or not
that Canada is a second class environment? Right? So good question,

(34:14):
So I can I can trace it certainly in my life. Um.
I traced the rise of of positive self identity and
Canadians and national pride with the after Canaan content regulations
came in. Before that, there was very few if no,
there wasn't no music industry and there were very few
artists that you could look up to as Canadians. There
were role models or that talked about Canadian things or whatever.

(34:37):
And again the ones that you you were aware of
moved to the US and and came through the U
S system. And um, the existence of groups like the
Tragically Hip, I think are is in incredible success story.
Even though they never really had a lot of success
outside of Canada, this level of success that had had
inside the country was absolutely unprecedented. And really it doesn't

(34:59):
matter that they weren't that successful anywhere else, because um,
I don't want to underplay the success they did have,
but they weren't as nearly as anywhere else. And that's
that's an amazing thing because look at any other healthy
music ecosystem around the world, like Britain. We always talked
about all these great stars coming out of Britain, all
the great music. Well if you actually live there for
a little while to see all the stuff that doesn't
get out right, and like the madness the syndrome right

(35:24):
from you know, decades ago, and you talk to Britain,
what do you mean you've never heard of madness? You know?
So same thing. And so I think that the existence
of that kind of thing is as an indication of
a healthy music ecosystem, and Canada nerve used to have that. Okay,
one more thing used to be if someone made it.
You mentioned you know Neil Young, There's Joni Mitchell, Bryan Adams.

(35:44):
They would basically base themselves in the United States. Do
you think that's changing? Yeah, although I think you go,
you go, rid of your business needs you to go. Um.
And so you look at Drake. You know, he's got
homes here, He's got homes you know, in in Toronto
still and a lot of them, you know, it's the
Canada is their emotional home now more than it ever
was before. And you look at Drake, how proud he

(36:06):
is a Toronto and he's been multibillion dollars worth of
ambassador branding for the for the city. Um. And that
never used to happen before either, you know, I mean
people were before Canadian content sometimes in some way Canadians
were kind of embarrassed to be Canadians. And then the
first wave was they weren't embarrassed anymore. But they're quietly proud,
and now they're very loudly proud. And that's been an

(36:29):
incredible development. And and it's absolutely guarantee you very much
driven by by Canadian artists emerging. Okay, so go back
to the Grass. So the Grassy starts up, Drake's on it.
Just to be clear, how many years is the Grassy run? Oh,
I don't know, it's got to be fifteen. Anyway, Drake
wasn't on from the beginning. I'm not sure. I don't.

(36:50):
I don't think he was whatever. But um, so fast
forward to he leaves the show. It's my it's early, myself,
let's stop it because it's important. It's like Trump. The
Grassy was not only popular in Canada, was distributed certainly
in the United States, right, and nobody in Canada other
than people in the television business knew that it was
a success in the US. And um was it also

(37:12):
aired elsewhere? Oh yeah, all over the lot of countries
around the world. Yeah, but it was on Nickelodeon here.
I think that's so funny story when um uh, shortly
after Drake broke as an art music artist. Um, my
wife and family and I were in l A visiting
with some people I used to work with here and
to two women that hadded families and they used to
work within their sisters and uh um uh. Their kids

(37:35):
were younger than ours. And we're all sitting in this
big family restaurant, big long table. Are my family on
one side, there is on the other side. And the
kids were really quiet. They were not talking at all,
and they were just staring at us. And after a
few minutes it got kind of uncomfortable. And and then
the bravest one spoke up and said, you guys don't
sound Canadian. And we said, what do you mean. They said,

(37:56):
you don't sound like those people in the grass And
I said, oh, you watched a grassy and Selene their
mothers said, my friend Selene that their mother said, are
you nuts? This is the biggest thing amongst the teens
and tweens down here, and nobody in the Canadian music
industry anyway knew that. And that's one of the reasons
why Drake was overlooked by the Canaan music business. Certainly,

(38:16):
one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made in my
career was I could never, I can never. I'll never
forget every week for a year in early my Space days,
Barb Seten, who worked for me, you know very well,
in Tanya Coglan and Mike Fox and UH, my staff
and my publish in Canada would sit around and we'd
have an a R meeting and we would filter the
MySpace charts for Canada and Drake was number one and

(38:36):
number two for a year and UM, but we didn't
know why this was. I mean, listen to the music
with that was pretty good, and you know, and and
but we just didn understand the entire picture because we
had no idea that he would had, you know, hundreds
of thousands of fans in America. So basically, his mixtapes
are blowing up in America and we didn't know that.
And people who follow that stuff in the US, the

(38:57):
little Waynes and then the people in the industry saw
the happening and that was the That was the moment
when everything became possible for Canadian music because they didn't
care where he's from, because the American public was had spoken.
And so from that point on it has not only
has it not mattered that you're Canadian in those those genres,
but now it's cool to be Canadian. UM. A couple

(39:18):
of years ago, UH, one of my publisher members, UM
who's runs a multinational in Toronto, the Toronto office the
multinationalist sent we were talking about this very issue, and
he said, yeah, so and so the you know, the
head of the us AT us off Creative Stuff just
called last week and said, we're signing this girl in
l A. Um looking at her bio material, turns out

(39:39):
she was raised in l A but born in Toronto.
Would you mind if we said she's from Toronto? That
is really a switch. Let's mind blowing to Canadians, right
to think that that anybody would ever think it's cooler
to be from from Toronto than l a. But in
many ways it's true now, you know, at least, I
mean what it is is is that Canadians, don't they
people growing up admiring Drake will now take it for

(40:02):
granted that you can conquer the world and you can
do it from Toronto, and you can do it proudly
and there, and that you know, there's kids coming to
Toronto as tourists that want to stand in the street
corner that he talks about in his songs, just like
you know, used to happen to Canadians listening to American
songs right come in l A Okay before the Toronto.
See not that there always hasn't been a Toronto scene.
The big scene was in Montreal. Broken social scene. What

(40:26):
do you think cause that well, broken social scenes partly
from Montreal. Well, I mean did Montreal see I don't
want to make it about broken social Yeah, well Montreal's
tray will be vibrant city. That's one of the greatest
um places in the world to go to school, for instance,
and so and and you know it's it's a very
European culture. That's the uh work to live culture more

(40:49):
than the work they live to work culture. So you know,
they take art seriously. Um, they take culture seriously. And um,
there's there would used to be a lot of clubs
and and and it's a big call ug town so
you get that that melting pot as well, and get
arcade fire out of their for instance, right, um and um.
You know it's also kind of the Quebec music scene

(41:10):
is kind of her metrically sealed. It's sort of like
almost like Nashville where um, or even in England in
a way like I I look at those music scenes
as places where you look at it as a sport.
You're in the stadium and the game is unfolding on
the field in front of it. You can understand the game.
You can see the prep with the ends of the box. Right,
So cabecs like that and US and and uh it's
um it's got a star system and um uh and

(41:33):
it's kind of it's never easy to get careers reving,
but it's probably easier there than some other places. To
what degree do you believe Canadian social safety net boost
music development? What's huge? Because um uh you know of
Canadian content and the government grant supports and other other

(41:54):
other encouragement of the arts. Um and uh, that's all
tied to the same mentality, right, and you know your
Canadian musician doesn't have to worry about going to the
hospital and if it's going to bankrupt them. Uh, you
know which is you know a huge thing. Let's say
I'm a I'm a twenty two year old person making
beats in Canada. Can I get money from the government

(42:14):
just to live? Uh, They'll give you a check to live,
but um, you can You've got organizations like factor forgetting
music organizations. I'm not even in the music business. To
what degree you know you don't get paid by the governments.
That's what squee is their welfare well, it's like welfare
like there is anywhere. But our musicians living on welfare

(42:36):
these days not so much now because there's a lot
of employment. You know, it's it's a healthy economy people have.
It's a gig economy. So people they'll have a day
gig and you know, and they uh spend their evenings
and weekends banging away at their at their art and
eventually I could give up the day gig if they're lucky. Okay,
Vancouver was historically a rock town. Is that still true Vancouver? Um,

(42:58):
there's a lot of people talked about the Vancouver music scene. UM.
In some ways people say it's dead. Um, certainly the
rock side of it because the club scene has disappeared
a lot. UM. But you know, we had so canon
in our in our staff. We truly believe that, UM,
Vancouver could be the next biggest place because again you
talk about multicultural it's amazing and we just think that

(43:21):
people aren't fishing in the right ponds and we're making
big strides and making connections in the you know, South
Asian communities and uh places where you know there's somebody
in their bedroom that's making something incredible, and UM, we
just got it. They're not connected to the business because
they're growing up not knowing. Right, Okay, the story and
you were part of it. The story twenty years ago,
years ago was how publishers were starting acts and then

(43:44):
they graduated to the labels. To what degree is so
can involve in development and what place in the game.
So twenty three years ago, if you set out to
be a creator, music, creator, artist, writer, um, one of
the first two or three thoughts that came into your
brain was, oh, I gotta joined so can or if
the America asked CAMP B M I or pr S
in England. One of the reasons for that you see

(44:05):
it on record credits and you wouldn't necessarily know what
it is, but you see it relationships in relationship to
being a pro. So I got to join that. And
just to be clear, if I'm an American, can I
join so can? Uh? There's no rules, but we we
do not We don't want our members to leave and
become members of the U s p r os and
so therefore, and we don't want to sign people that

(44:26):
the U s p r O S would want to
sign in their own countries. So and I could do
it if I wanted to. There's no law that says
you can't. Um, but we we we respect their Okay,
So I go back to your point. Yeah, so, um,
what was my point? You're talking about Vancouver, right, Yeah,
so you're talking about development of acts, right, so me

(44:47):
thirty years ago we left it right, So when you
first started out years ago, you thought of joining. So
I can ask my whatever, um we're trying to do now,
is trying to get that little logo back in the
brain of somebody who was sitting in their bedroom and
they're fourteen years old and saying I think I want
to make music because there's a lawful lot of other
logos crowding it out. Okay, in the digital era, how

(45:08):
do you get that logo? See? Yeah, so um uh,
we want to treat We want to implant the thought
that your career starts here. Right. So, um, we have
what we call the new member value gap, which we
identified which is okay, if I joined, so can uh,
what what do I get? And well, you get royalties? Yeah,
but I don't have any music ding royalties yet? Right,

(45:28):
So so you get joined, so can even though you
don't have a record out? Yeah, yeah, we have five
or six thousand people you're joining. We have about a
hundred and sixty thousand members and UM, so we try
and create programs to UM. We look at as it's
like ecosystem. It's a pond. We want to be the
sunshine in the pond. We want to you know, there
to be more planked than you know, more guppies and
that kind of thing. And so uh, it's it's a

(45:51):
less targeted than a than a publishing company or record
label would do it. UM. You know, we have program
we have it. For instance, we have an educational program
called Cooking Beats where we have a famous beat maker
will set on the stage and it's like the motif
of a cooking show on TV. Instead of the cameras
and the ceiling looking down in the stove, we have
their laptop, laptop hooked up to a giant screen and
they tear apart one of their famous beats and then

(46:14):
we'll trought to set a community music week or conferences
like that, and and they're very very popular. Kids love it. Uh,
you know that gets the brand own, it gets it
educates people. We have song camps. Now, how about literally
giving an act money to develop or literally trying to
make in roads in a label or a publisher. So, um,

(46:34):
you know, again we're complimentary to what the publishers and
labels do. We think we're at the stage pre when,
prior to when people are ready for them. So if
we can do something to keep somebody alive for another year,
get them to a showcase, uh, get into a song camp,
get some craft development, and get them some confidence. When
we have a song camp, the number one thing that
comes out of it is self confidence. Yeah. You know,

(46:56):
every camp usually yields one song that gets cut or something,
but it's kind of they're always sequestered and people are
living together for a week and they come out of
it feeling like they just had a week's worth of
incredible group therapy. You know that they did make them
make the right choice in their life and they and
they have now a group of people that that they
know that think like them and et cetera. And so
just the boost of self confidence, um, keeps them alive

(47:19):
and and and and and working at their craft for
another year and then they're ready to get a record
deal or a publishing deal. Okay, So people thought hip
hop would die and today they would say it's like
rock and roll it's forever, but rock and roll seems
to have died. So as someone who's a big observer
of the scene certainly where it's happening, you know, what

(47:41):
is the runway, what is the roadmap into the future. Well,
it's somewhat controversial when I say this, and I don't
say it because I wanted to be this way, but
this is my own personal opinion of what the future holds.
Is that I think that the guitar is dead and
rock is dead. Uh, And then that's an exaggeration. They're

(48:02):
not dead, they're never going away, but they're never going
to be the primary yeah, like jazz um. And one
of the reasons for that is that's the unstoppable march
of technology, in the unstoppable march of the democratization of music,
the democratization of the making and music. So look back,
say um electric guitar wasn't was a great example itself

(48:25):
of of incredible democratization the creation of music. And so
before that you had big band era. You had to
bus loads full of really sophisticated people could read music,
write music, and we're well trained their instruments, and they
can only record if they went into a thing called
a studio owned by a record label, and um, that
was a very elite, closed group of people. Uh. Then

(48:48):
an electric guitar comes along and say, Buddy Holly's hands right,
three chords, just not doesn't know how to play his
guitar like a you know, famous traumpa player of Benny
Goodman knew how to play his clarinet or whatever. He
wasn't trying. He just knew three chords. And he recorded
in a garage, which is also democratization of recording. Where
is you know, um, what's his name, Norma Petty? Yeah, yeah,

(49:10):
this producer probably bought used gear from one of those
big New York studios that you couldn't get into anymore
and and put it in his garage and and that
was you didn't they didn't need permission from anybody, And
they went toured with three guys at the station wagon,
hugely forward, you know, sampling, same thing, right. So I
think that, um, that march of technology that democratizes creation
of music is unstoppable, and and it puts creation of

(49:33):
music in the hands of people who don't have any training,
and every generation, people who are most interested in making
music pick up the tools of their generation, which today
is a laptop or a phone. Um and uh, and
starts to make music with those tools, and the very
best of them, in the most motivated and driven, you know,
end up becoming successful and make a difference, and that

(49:53):
becomes their generations music. That's what's happening now. And I
think personally the next wave of the democratization of the
creation of music is artificial intelligence, because I think I
think the the future of creation of music will be
how people humans create art by mucking with the technology
a little bit deeper. So some examples. UM I started

(50:18):
as a recording engineer and UM, I watched the introduction
of the drum machine, and uh. First of all, drummers,
of course were horrified, and they had every excuse in
the world. Why was no good, It didn't feel like
a human blah blah blah. And of course people try
to use it to make it sound real. And and
then the smart drummers said, well, they bought one and
they became a percussion solutionist instead of a drummer, and

(50:41):
they still had the same producers would hire them, and
now they hire them to make that drum machine thing.
And then um, eventually people started using a drum machine,
uh in ways that people couldn't play drums, to take
a high hat and go you know that kind of thing,
and and so that's what it got its real value
because it's doing something in the person can't do. Then
I watched the sampler come in the fair Light, was

(51:03):
the first commercial digital sampler, and um, I remember the
very first reaction people was always, although now we don't
have to hire a cello player, I can sample a
cello and played on the keyboard. And then I attributed
to may not be true, but I personally in my
life attribute the breakthrough commercial breakthrough of the art of
using a sampler was owner of Lonely Heart by Yes,

(51:25):
Trevor Horne produced it. And I remember where I was
when I first heard. I was driving along the freeway
in Toronto and I had to pull over because I
couldn't believe what I was hearing. I'd never heard anything
like it. And of course what he did instead of
trying to emulate something real, he said, gee, I won
if we put the entire Lenon Symphia orchestra on on
each key and then went, you know, but right, and

(51:47):
he created something that humans couldn't do, so I think
that that's the same thing with artificial intelligence. Another example
of technology like that would be the auto tune. So
the guy invented auto tune, I've read interviews with him.
He invented auto tune to tune vocals um And yet
you know, the breakthrough for auto tune was the share
record and I believe and the guys were in the

(52:08):
studio I'm sure with her and they said, oh, it's
she's slightly out of tune. How what do we do.
I've heard this new thing called auto tune. Let's go
rent it. They rented it, They plug it in, and
what do you do when you plug it in a
piece of gear For the first time, you turn it
all the way left and then all the way right.
And when they turned it all the way right, it
went and invented that over auto tune sound. And then
the next wave of music I remember seeing was I

(52:29):
think we might have been Farrell or one of those producers,
and maybe a timble in Farrell. When the height of
when auto tune first came in widely, they said, even
if it's in tune, I auto tune it because that's
the sound of music today. And now You've got kids
growing up who were one of us to be singers,
and they're listening to auto tune records and they naturally
sound like their auto tune. So all you look at

(52:51):
all those kind of developments, and then I think it's
really easy to look at artificial intelligence. Okay, that's certainly
democratizes creating music because anybody un initiated describe what artificial
intelligence is and how it would apply in the music business.
I'm not intelligent enough to aren't describe artificial intelligence, but

(53:11):
you know, it's you program the computer to the point
where it can imitate human behavior and then hopefully go
a little step. Well yeah, and uh and some machine
learning is another another term for it. So there's already
platforms out there that make music that um that either
have no intervention from a person or you you interact

(53:34):
with it in different ways like you type in purple
or something and um uh, so that I think that's
the future right now. Way, just to be clear, because
based on all your things, you've said, there's a technology
and the human plays with the technology. Do you believe
that ultimately AI will create its own music or what

(53:56):
the human will do with the tools of a the
letter so well. First of all, AI is making music
right now. But again, just like those examples I gave, um,
they're using people are expecting regular sounding music to come
out of it, and people are saying, well, it's not
very good, or it's not you know, it's there's no

(54:17):
soul or whatever. But I think what's gonna happen is
that somebody will interact with it and come up with
something the equivalent of taking the high hat and going
They'll do that with words, they'll do with melodies, they'll combine,
you know, um, different strains of music that people have
never done before. They'll do it in a way you
can't before, and they'll do it without any knowledge of
how to do that because they're just interacting computer. Okay,

(54:39):
how comes certain sounds have their window and faith Like
in the late seventies it was the syndrome, right, but
the fake hand clap of the t R O eight
O eight lives on. Why do you think that is?
I have no idea, I mean doing what I hear that,
I go remember that two. So it immediately makes it

(55:01):
me feel like these people are not testing the limits,
which brings me to the next question. Irrelevant of what
instruments or how this music is created right now, A
lot of the popular music's lacks melody. Do you believe
melody will come back? Well, I don't even say it.
I don't even think it lacks melody today. I think that, Um,

(55:22):
you know, it's really easy to say, oh, today's music
sucks in whatever way, either that sucks generally or that
has no melody or whatever, and I think that we
have no perspective on it. I think that every generation
has always said that about the following generation's music. Um,
I hear lots of melody cooks on record. Generally there
are somebody a featured singer and a rap record or there,
or there are an instrumental part. But I hear lots

(55:44):
of melodies. There's no question that records today, the production
it forms more of the of the core of the
of the record than in the in the past. But
again that that's just a um, the march of time.
That's progress. I mean that there's more technology involved with
making a Well, I would say a lot of the
be driven records, melody is secondary, tertiary or there at all.

(56:07):
So just like the same thing. You know, there's a
steampunk movement which drives me nuts, but one would anticipate
it somewhere down the line. There's gonna just like with vinyl,
which is really amplified beyond the reality. Don't get me
started exactly, We're on the same page, it sounds like.
But the UM there will be people who would probably

(56:28):
return to acoustic instruments just as a reaction. Yeah, there's
no question the pendulum always swings. But I think that
the real instrument backlash will be upward peaks of downward curve. Okay,
so do you anticipate any changes imminently? I think that,

(56:49):
you know, the next few years, whether it's two, three, five,
we're gonna see UM great records come out that have
astonishing things about them. They are there because of the
AI and have with the way the person screw with it. Again,
I can't, you know, I'm not smart enough to involved
in enough to imagine exactly what it is. But very simplistically,
you know you're gonna get somebody who takes Bob Dylan

(57:11):
a lyric program and turns Bob Dylan to ten, takes
a melody program and turns you know, McCartney to minus
five and hooks up the digital of delay in a
phaser between them or something. You know, that's a very
uber simplistic way of describe. You believe that's within the
next two or three years. I think two to five years. Okay,
let's talk. Spotify is the dominant player in streaming music,

(57:32):
even eclipses YouTube at this point. Uh. But if you
look at the Spotify Top fifty, unlike if people who
grew up in the air of Top forty radio, it
is pretty monochronistic, if that's even a word, monochrome, and
then it's all basically hip hop, maybe a little pop
thrown in. This is a unique thing because there used

(57:53):
to always be a filter saying no, we're gonna put
in these other elements. And to agree there's radio radio
to a great degree replicates that. To what degree is
that evidence of what people really want? Or do we
need an opportunity for other styles of music. That's a
great question. And I sort of alluded to it earlier
that we're concerned about that when it comes to say

(58:16):
the existence of Canadian content, right, UM are very early
on in our studies. We're going to refine our data,
but our data is showing that, um, the consumption of
Canadian music by Canadians is disturbingly low in the in
the digital space compared to the traditional broadcast media. And
if that's the case, um our next thinking is that

(58:40):
it must be a discover ability issue, because there's no
availability issue. Everybody's got the music on those platforms. And
an example of and so basically they're unintentionally biased, perhaps
in favor of of cultures from large countries or large populations,
or you know, certain genres of music or whatever. It's
it's an unintentional and biased and um a good example

(59:02):
that would be you know, the it was that Martina
McBride into last year since she tried to create an
automated playlist and she seated it with a Rebend McEntire
track or something like that, and then uh, nineteen of
the other tracks that were automatically generated for we're all men.
Uh you know so, and these aren't There's nothing evil
about all this stuff. These are an unintended consequences of

(59:24):
the mecha describing mechanisms. And I think these these platforms
genuinely a want to make music as discoverable as possible
and and and please the customer that way, and be
they want to localize their products for different territories and
different cultures. I just think that we're not there yet
to the point where it's done done well enough. And
uh so that's a concern of ours in terms of

(59:45):
Canadian content. But if you could insert any subgenre or
small genre or of music there that I think everybody
should be as concerned. Uh, because um of what you're saying. Okay,
you started out as a drummer. Okay, drummer. When did

(01:00:05):
you start playing drums? It was about five. My dad
was an amateur drummer and he your father, and so
it's in the family. Yeah. He was a big jazz fan.
Uh and um uh. He would played in little jazz
combos and um. And he actually taught me how to
listen to records. We'd sit around on a Saturday afternoon
and you'd have a beer and from in front of
the big gold console stereo that's as big as a couch,

(01:00:28):
and he'd be listening to you know, Benny Goodman and
Count Basie and all those people, and uh, he'd say,
listen to this, listen that secks, so listen to how
that got drummer did this? And uh so that really
got me both intrigued and and interested and be able
to listen, right and uh. And then I played in
a town marching band that my dad was involved with
to keep the kids off the street. We had no
music in schools. But I was the youngest kid ever

(01:00:50):
in the band. And I would we'd be on the
march and I'd be playing the symbols and um, I
would hit them so hard that they they'd stick like
a suction cup, but to go clang, clank. And then
so the leader of the band would mark time and
make for the band to catch up, and he'd take
them out of my hands and unstick them and hand
them back to me. And then we also played uh.

(01:01:11):
Concert was a concert band to like forty kids, right.
You know, I was probably ten when I joined, but
there was maybe the oldest seventeen eighteen. And um, the
leader of the band, his name is Frank Banks, was
really a progressive guy and he and he was trying
to keep the kids interested in and this is the
air at rock era. So he did an arrangement of
Tommy's overture that we were playing in this you know
forty person Bank. Yeah, and then and then he let

(01:01:34):
myself and the other drummer bring our drum kids in
and we did dueling in a god at avita solos
in the middle of this you know, horn orchestra, um. Yeah,
and then you know bands and everything. But I wanted
to be um. I didn't think you could you could.
I didn't think you could be from my town and
and and and be successful in me it's just to

(01:01:54):
be from my audience. Where was your it's called Lindsay
was about an hour and a half from northeast to
tron On and uh and in the entire existence of
the town, nobody ever made anything out of being a
music career. And talk about Canadian content impact um uh.
At our work show that's coming up in the end
of March, um, we're probably there's probably half a dozen

(01:02:18):
or more awards going to people from the area of
my town. Okay, so you're growing up, Are you like
a music fanatic, buying the records, listening to the radio
or is just one thing that you do? No? No,
I was fanatical about it, and I was fanatical about records.
I was. I just mesmerized by what I called my
magic records. And everybody's got them in their life. There's

(01:02:38):
those records that you know when your girlfriend leaves your
something that saves your life by listening to it, or
just takes you to another world transport you and I
had records like that, and and what would you remember
a couple of those records? Um, well, certainly Dark Side
of the Moon uh. And in fact that record um
and the guests who I get that the minute, but

(01:02:58):
they guess who to me are the big bang a
Canadian music and and and before them you didn't think
that you could be Canadian and you could do this.
And after them, they made people realize that you could
be Canadian, you could have world success and and and
not have to move to the US. And even in
my life, bigger story was behind the scenes, you could
do that. And Jack Ridgards and the guy who discovered

(01:03:18):
and produced them, became sort of my hero. And I
wanted to Uh. I wanted to find him because I
wanted to find what the secret of making a magic
record was. And so I was in the technology and
electronics and and when you know, you're the era of
Pink Floyd and all the flying echoes and things like that,
and I thought, Okay, it's technology that's the secret to
making a magic record. And so I wanted to become

(01:03:39):
a recording engineer, and um, I wanted to thought you
could must be a school for it, because you look
at a picture of a recording console, it was a
thousand knobs on it. And there wasn't any schools in
the world. And I looked for two years and finally
the first world's first credited chorus for recording engineering record
record production sprung up in London, Ontario, Canada, called Music
Industry Arts at Fanshaw College, and I found it. It
was amazing moment in my life when I realized there

(01:04:01):
is a school and my goal was to find the school,
get into school, graduate, find Jack Richardson and go work
for him. And that's exactly what happened. Okay, how long
were we in the school? Three years? How did you
find Jack Richardson? Um? He came down to the guest
lecture one day because his son, Garth was a new
student in the first year and I was in my
third year, and I thought, this is it. My heroes

(01:04:23):
come I this is my day. And I basically falled
him around like a puppy dog and basically hung onto
his ankle, wouldn't let go all day, and finally at
the end of the day, he turned his son and
he said, who's that kid? And uh Karth said, well,
he's actually the number one student in the school. And
he said and and he said, he's not crazy, he
just thinks he's said you're just his hero. So Jack

(01:04:46):
turned him and say, if you're ever in Toronto sometime,
give me a call and come into the studio. Yeah, exactly.
And they basically never left. And I graduated and he
got an internship. Didn't call it that then, but he
and he's hired me for the summer. And when I graduated,
and the very very first day, my other hero was

(01:05:06):
bob Ezman and the very very first day was bob
Ezman session. So it was like, what was your role
was in turn? Okay? And you remember what the session was? Uh?
Tim Curry her picture Schaces first solo record. Okay, So
how did you graduate? Up the ladder in the studio?
Because I had been to school and and I was

(01:05:27):
in the first generation of people had been to school,
nobody knew what I knew and U uh. One day
Jack was producing a vocal and the head engineer UM
couldn't for some reason, couldn't get sound working and Jack
and the and the singer got up pretty upset of
chorus after about five minutes of no sound, and uh
singer said, I'm going to get a coffee and and

(01:05:48):
Jack turned to the engineer said I'm gonna get a
coffee too, And if when I come back, if it's
not happening, you're done that kind of thing, right, So
he was just shaking, right. And because I knew how
to work the board. I knew how to work the
board because when I was hanging out there before they
hired me, I would talk to the maintenance guy and
he would give me a photocopy of the schematic of
the board and then a photocopy of the front page

(01:06:09):
of the manual. So I built a life size cardboard
cutout of the board when I was in school, and
I used to pretend to work it was sitting in bed.
So by time I started there as a gopher, I
knew how to work the board, eve though I've never
touched it. What kind of board did they have? There's
a highly modified auditronics And what was the name of
the studio then Nimbus nine. Yeah, so um, anyway, so

(01:06:29):
they I knew what was I knew why the guy
would couldn't get the sound, but I didn't want to
embarrass them in front of Jack. And so as soon
as Jack left the control and I said, Jim, try
the red button over there, and he looked at me like,
who do you? Who are you? What do you know?
And uh, Finally, just before Jack came in, and he
knew he had nothing else to lose, so he tried
the red button in the sound came on right. So
from that moment on, they trusted me to do things.
And then I happened to be lucky enough to be

(01:06:54):
asked to engineer a demo for a band called the
Kings because they're managers. Life was a receptionist in the
studio and she talked Jack into give him the band downtime,
free time, but he said, only if you can get
one of the guys to engineer it. And nobody wanted
to do it, and again I said I'll do it,
and they looked at me. He said, you you don't
know how to do anything, and I said no, I
went to school, remember, And they had no choice. They

(01:07:16):
had how long have you been working there at that?
Three or four months? Maybe six months? And um, and
so they said, well, I. I I guess it's the only
the only choice. So they let me go in that
weekend and I worked with this band and and they
went off to try and get a record deal. And
about six nine months later they couldn't get a record deal,
but they came to the father they got guitar player's
father had died left him a lot of money, so
they said, we want to make an independent record and uh,

(01:07:38):
we would have blockbooked the studio for a month. We
want Mike to engineer and produce it, and they said,
but he's only ever done your demo. And then we
also said, um, nobody's ever had any success with independent records.
This is nineteen eighty let's say anyone and m and
we tried to talk about of it, and they finally said, look,
we're trying to block book your studio for a month.
Do you want the business or not? So they said, yeah,

(01:08:00):
you can do it, but Mike has to work with
the other engineer named Ringo Ringo Hersina, who was how
many rooms were there in the studio just one, but
actually that factors into the rest of the story. So
we we so Ringo and I the next day started
making this record with this band called the Kings, and uh,
you know, thirty days go by and we make the record,
and we're starting to do rough mixes and and and
they had a new song was actually two songs and

(01:08:21):
one it's called this beat goes on and switch right
and and they had. But but in our really triumphant
moment during the making the record was figuring how to
connect the two songs because it recorded separately, right, and
they were so much Why did you decide to connect them? Well?
That they did that was that was the bands and
and there and one of the managers was I thought
was an r and our genius. They had decided to

(01:08:43):
do this, and they had they had realized by playing
it live that they didn't work very well independentalty. But
you put them two together. And that was one of
the biggest lessons I learned about hit songs was from this,
because I asked the manager, I said, why did you
guys know that this was the only way it works?
You said, very simple. Hit records are rhythm melody hooks.
One of them's got the melody hook, the other has
got the rhythm hook, you know, and that kind of thing. Right. So, anyway,

(01:09:05):
we were had the rough mixes together and Bob, I
know he got the credit on the record. I bought
the record. Yeah, well he so he came around, uh,
trying to measure. He was thinking of buying the place,
and he was measuring one of the rooms to see
if you could build a second room, second studio. And
when the band heard the Bob was there, they said, oh,
you got to bring him in and hear the stuff,
and and Ringo and I said, on, I don't know,

(01:09:26):
you know, he doesn't probably want to hear this stuff.
And Ringoes and said, you know, he hasn't worked with
an unknown band since Alice Cooper. And we've tried all
these excuses. We didn't want to bother Bob. And finally
the manager said, inter just me to him. So okay,
so we go introduced them and then they talked for
a while and and he brings Bob back in the
control room. Bob says, let me hear it. So he pressed.
We pressed playing on the tape, and the first thing
he hears is this. He goes on switching the guide.

(01:09:48):
He stops it at the end and he says, there's
a hit record. I'm gonna get you guys a record deal.
Seven days later, he had them to deal with Electric Records,
and he came in the in the studio waving a
telex or something and uh saying, great news. You know,
We've got the record deal, and I'm gonna produce and
reproduce the record. And Ringo and I sat during it,

(01:10:08):
where does that leave us? And Bob looked at us like, oh,
you guys are gonna engineer an associate produce. We said, okay, fantastic,
and so we just the next day we started remaking
the same album. Did he remake it from scratch? Oh? Yeah?
And and and and you know, it was an incredible
example of Bob's genius because he made some subtle changes that,

(01:10:28):
in my opinion, made a huge, huge difference and and
um uh so it was good. But although that was
the punk era and um, and the band was not
really a punk band, but they were trying to adopt
a few the ethics of punk, and Bob was really
into punk, and and he decided that he didn't want
to uh spend any time making getting the sounds, so

(01:10:50):
um it was basically, you know, put the microphones up
in a roll tape kind of thing. And and to
this day I figured I might have still been an
engineer if they would have given us time to get
better sounds. But I don't know that record was a hit,
at least in Los Angeles. How come they could never
follow it up? Why? Why do most people not follow
it up? Because it's lightning, you know? I guess they
Also they kicked the manager out of the out of

(01:11:11):
the whole situation, and UM and I really felt that
he was an incredibly important part of the of the
creative dynamic of the band. And so after I left
working for Jack Richardson and then left after we left
working for Bob too, UM, I went back and found
that guy and we started our own company. We called
ourselves the Producers. Uh. Inspired by the movie and UM

(01:11:35):
went around finding bands, take him a studio and make
records and UM UH did a lot of great stuff,
but couldn't get arrested. And eventually, UH Frank Davies was
running a TV Canada offered me a job as created
person there. Okay, let's go back. So what was your
How long were you an engineer after that King's record?
A couple of years, I guess. And you worked with

(01:11:57):
Bob Yeah, yeah, I worked with him on the next
King's record and then Kiss record the elder. So you
were Bob's guy, one of them. Yeah, right, how did
it end for you? Um? So you know, when you're
working a studio, it's twenty four hours a day, seven
days a week, thirty days a month, right, And UM,

(01:12:18):
I had treated my schooling that way. So three years
of seven school, uh, probably three years seven in the
studio and I was about at the end of my
rope and I didn't really realize it. And um, and
Bob had taken for some reason, I guess with the
timing of the Kings or the or the Kiss was
working out the way it was supposed to be, and

(01:12:39):
we had to do both records at once basically, so
he had we do two weeks with Kiss, two weeks
with Kings too. Was Kissed Kings and it was just
driving me crazy. And finally, uh, um, one day Bob
was really late for the studio and UM, we got
tired of waiting for him because we had decided that
if we had worked ahead, he might not like it,
and uh, we be working for nothing and if and

(01:13:00):
so W do W that we decided not to decided
to go out to dinner and uh, soon after we left,
he arrived and uh he was upset that we weren't there,
and so we got back to the studio. He said, Okay,
just because you guys have done this, we're gonna have
to work the weekend. And that was gonna be the
first weekend I'd had off in months. And somebody said
work the weekend. It literally heard of spring my brain

(01:13:22):
go boing. I turned around and walked out the door. Uh.
The studio was the edge of in the edge of Toronto. Um.
I walked in the countryside for probably two hours. Bob
and his wife and it was just getting dark. They
came in looking for me. People thought I'd like jumped
in the river or something, and uh uh I turned
down the offer to drive me back to the studio.
I got back to the studio, I went in and

(01:13:43):
tacked up a sign on the wall said gone fishing.
And a friend of mine worked for a wholesale travel agency,
and I said, caled her and said get me on
the beach tomorrow. So I went to the Bahamas for
a couple of weeks and two or three weeks and
sat of the beach, just staring at the beach. During
an that was the end. No, what happened was I
met a Rastafarian. Uh, this is a true story. I
met a Rastafarian on the beach and u and started

(01:14:05):
smoking joints with him, and he said, uh, you know
what your problem is. I don't want to take the accent,
but he said, your problem is you've spent too much
time working on your career and basically, give you've atrophied
as a person, like a three legged stool. You know,
you've got the physical mental and uh and and and
spiritual legs and a couple of have fallen are short,

(01:14:27):
you've fallen over. So I thought that's a great thing.
So I came back and I didn't care about my
career for a while. And uh then kind of stuff
started to happen, and I found got the partner with
that producer with the Manka. But when you came back,
you didn't work in the studio anymore. Did nothing for
a while. And then and found my partner and we
found and we started, um, you know, finding gods in
the studio. But when you walked for good, they were

(01:14:50):
cool with that. Today the people are lining up to work. Yeah,
Bob was incredibly understanding about it. I mean, you know,
he knows the pressures of all that stuff, and and
so you know, I I learned more about balancing myself.
I think, you know, with that and and it's I
think that's a good, good lesson for anybody's life. You know.
So you go to work for a TV publisher, how
do you end up running E M my music Publishing Canada?

(01:15:12):
I was so I was really lucky that. Um Uh.
Shortly after I got there, um I met with one
of the writers of a band called Toronto that had
been signed there and at a TV Canada and it
was it was the biggest outlet for Canadian talent. Um.
They had Aldo Nova, they had Eddie Schwartzer wrote me
Hip Hippie with your best shot. Um they had a

(01:15:33):
big had chili whack um a lot of success. And
they had this band called Toronto that was on Solid
Gold Records and Neil Dixon's label, and um uh, the
good Brian Allen, the guitar player me and writer called
me up and he said, you know, our deal is
up with you guys, and you only published the stuff
that was on our records, and I have some stuff
that wasn't on the record. I don't know if you

(01:15:54):
want to hear it? I said yeah, sure. So he
came in and played me a bunch of demos and
one of them was a song called what About Love
and it was a little cassette port of studio demo
and I said, wow, that's a great song. I've only
been on the job for about a month. I already
know that I can't sell that song with with that
bat of a demo. And uh, then he called me
a week later, so I found Uh. We actually tried

(01:16:15):
to record it on the album the Jim Valence produced
for us, and Jim Valence co wrote it and I
got left off the last minute, so I have a
rough mix of the produced version one it here. I said, yeah, sure,
so I brought it in. It was just I thought
it was a total smash. Got it to Don Gerson,
who was ahead of in our capitol, who wanted songs
for Heart, and UM he picked it for Heart and
they had a giant hit with it and basically resurrected

(01:16:36):
a career, and um gave me a career in music
publishing because all of a sudden, now I had I
scored a big goal, right And that was right before
Michael Jackson bought the company. Just stop there that the
original rough mix. How close was that to the finished
hard version? Unbelievably close. It was my first lesson in
that almost every nine times out of ten, when somebody

(01:16:57):
uh gets a demo and and and and cuts a
record of it, it's it's just like the demo. And
that's a big lesson for me and publishing in some
song plugging is that nobody has any imagination, right, Okay,
So Michael Jackson then buys the label, but he buys
it to get the get the songs and fires everybody
in the world. Um. And just as we're turning out

(01:17:18):
the lights, I got a call from a journalist music
journalist named Nick Cruen who worked for a Maga trick
Natie mag trade magazine called the record David Farrell and
David now has f y I music, which you've probously seen,
remember the record and uh, And he had assigned Nick
the job of trying to get somebody in a TV
to talk about the fact that everybody's losing their jobs.

(01:17:39):
And he called me up and he said, you're my
last chance. You're the lowest guy in the poll in
the world. And I've tried to get everybody talking, nobody
will and so I had this vision that if I
was going to go down, I might as well go
down in flames. And I thought, well, I'll just be honest,
and that I actually honest to God. Had a vision
of a Star Trek episode where um, they were lost
in space and they and they couldn't get a hold
of anybody, and there was a ship passing a few

(01:18:01):
light years away, so to get its attention, Spock jettison
to the last bit of anti matter and blew it up.
In of course, the explosion caused the ship to come
and find them and save them. So I thought, I'm
gonna create an explosion, So I I said, you know that,
how I talked about how important a TV had been
to h to Canadian talent and getting an outlet to
the world, And um, Michael Jackson was just going to

(01:18:22):
mothball the whole thing. And he presents an image of
being a caring religious person. He just turns out to
be another ruthless muggul. So he printed it and everything
and never thought anything else of it, And um went
off of my were Mary Wade and I actually got
a job at Attic Records, uh Elamaire's company doing A
and R and UM. Unbeknownst to me, this got picked
up by an American wire service, and I was being

(01:18:43):
quoted on radio stations and newspapers, calling Michael Jackson and
Ruthless Mugu and also unbeknownst to me, he was reading
all this should be making a commitment to all these
writers and things, and and they go, okay, what do
you want to do? And what Branco told me was
that he said find this guy and how room. So
I'm working for Almayer and I get a call from

(01:19:04):
the head of CBS Songs in Canada because CBS Songs
had had the adminised administration of it, and he said,
there's an airport. There's a plane ticket at the airport
for you're going to New York to talk to the
head of CBS Songs. I said, okay, So I went
to the airport and got it picked up by a
car at Lagority and they took me to see Mike's
Stewart and Harvey Shapiro iran CBS Songs and and they

(01:19:27):
said Michael Jackson's read your comments and then just stared
at me. And I thought I was getting up with
the Hudson River. And finally I just I looked up,
I looked down and left right, and I just you know,
it was really really awkward. And so finally Mike Stewart goes,
he wants to give you a chance to put up
a shut up and uh, he said, So I said okay,

(01:19:48):
And he said, all right, so go back to Canada
and uh work for CBS songs. So that was that
was the negotiation that I went back to downstairs, got
in the car that was waiting for me, went back
to the airport, and and what did you tell Al Mayor? Um?
I don want to embarrass him, so uh, but but
I'll h had actually said to me, I don't want

(01:20:10):
you to take this job, just waiting for a job
from Major to come along, right, And and there was
some things about the job that I didn't think we're
as advertised and and and um, so I didn't feel
so bad about it other than I did feel bad
about it, but I felt like it wasn't what I
thought it was gonna be. Right, And and so I said, well,
you don't have to you don't have to pay me

(01:20:31):
for the week I've been here. And he said Okay, okay,
so you gotta work for CBS. How does that morph
in the E M R sp K bought it? And um,
by this time, you know, I'm doing pretty well as
a song plugger. I'm getting songs and Joe Cocker records
and things like that. And uh um, I guess Marty Bander,
Charles Koppelman and Steven swid were doing their due diligence

(01:20:53):
on the office and they had me condend to New
York and meet them, and I think I gave a
pretty passionate pitch about Canadian music and and how the
how the future could be and how um you know
this government support and all this kind of thing, and
and they so they seemed to like me, and they
empowered me, and and then actually moved me to l A.

(01:21:14):
So mid eighties, UM, my wife Sam and I and
my oldest, my then only child, t J packed up
and moved to l A and worked for EM Despicat
down here initially, and then they sold the E M.
I became M I and uh um. While that was
down here. Um, one of the things that did was
he introduced me to Charles Koppleman and Marty Bander and

(01:21:35):
induced me to Artie Mogul. You must know, Artie the biggest,
most unforgettable character I've ever met in my life inside
or outside the business. Brooklyn Street hustler, you know, gambling addiction.
Uh he was the Forest Gump of the music business
right where almost anybody you wanted to name that was huge.
He had some sort of association with them or the

(01:21:56):
deal or whatever. Right And um so he said, Uh, okay, kid,
who do you want to meet? And I said Richard Perry,
as I was fascinated by producers, and uh so he
he literally picked up the phone and dialed his number
from memory and Richard answered and already said Richard, already
lunch the Dome tomorrow and then hung up and uh

(01:22:17):
dome was right next to our offices. And uh so
the next day we're walking over there, and he said,
we have to think of some excuse when we're meeting
Richard Perry. He doesn't want to meet you're you're just
a schmuck from Canada. And so he said. At this time,
we was right after we had Tracy Chapman was a
big case of success story, and all the labels wanted
to have a production deal with That's b k so
he said, um, we'll we'll tell him we need some

(01:22:37):
acts for the production company. So we sit down and
having lunch and he's telling us the different things he's
working on, and none of them seemed that interesting. And
then he could tell he wasn't getting a spark from us,
and so he kind of like reached down into the
bottom of his mental bag and said, well, it's one
of the things that when working on it's the Daughters
of Wilson of but beach boys and mamas and papas as.

(01:22:59):
So as he said that, he could tell all they
got a big rise from. Marty and I were looking
each other eyes bugging out, and so he switches in
the uber sales pitch mode. So already slammed the table
and he said, we want them. And then the entire
restaurant went silent, like you see in the movies, right,
and everybody's staring at us. And I said, Alartiy shouldn't
listen to some music first. He said, no, we want them,

(01:23:21):
and I said already, and we gotta listen to some music,
and he's all right, sending over some music. So we
go back to the office. An hour later, a messenger
rise at the cassette. We put it in. The very
first song of the cassette is hold On, and we
look at each other we go, I can't believe it.
So we said it to Charles Coppelman and the next
morning he calls from his car on the way and
he said, this is amazing. I'm going to sign them.

(01:23:42):
So again, we had all these output deals, right, had
production deals with all the different labels, and we had
to hand them. We had to pitch them certain number
of acts a year. So Arty says, watch this kid,
I'm gonna get the biggest record deal for a new
artist the history of mankind. So we've got to go
to dinner with all the heads of all the labels
and and uh, and we'll Phillips and uh watched the
wind up and he wound it up to six hundred

(01:24:04):
fifty dollars for the first record. And then bang, SPK
is sold and now it's SPK Records, and uh, Charles,
I'm in already's office when day Charles called and he said,
I got good news and bad news. The good news
is we want the girls for SPK Records. The bad
news is we're not paying them six hundred fifty grand
and you have to tell them. He said, watch this, kid,

(01:24:25):
I'm gonna wind it down. Only already could have done this,
and and but what he did was promised them that
SPK will stop at nothing to make the record successful.
And of course that's what was the case. Now were
you at the first SPK convention in the desert when
they debuted? Yeah, I was there with Hysteric and Michelle Phillips, etcetera. Okay,

(01:24:47):
how come Glenn Ballard ended up producing the record because
um uh Richard to develop the group had brought in
Glenn to do the demos, and so Glenn and co
written everything and produced the demos. The demo hold On
was phenomenal, you know. Okay, so it ends with an
E M. I. Ultimately when there's another corporate transition and

(01:25:07):
then you go to work for only and now you're
so kept. Who are you? Are you as a drummer,
a recording engineer, a publisher, a guy on performing end
of it performance rights. I'm a guy who was a
whole career was in search of the secret of making
a magic record, and one day I found I figured
it out and it wasn't um anything. The technology was

(01:25:28):
doing it wasn't anything about guiding the performance. It was
about what they were singing. It was the song that's
secret to making a magic record. And so I'm a
song person and I had a incredibly fortunate to to
exercise that love of song and songwriting as a publisher,
and now I'm doing that as a as a you know,

(01:25:49):
chief membership officer at so can UM. We're protecting writers,
protecting their rights, getting them paid, We're stimulating their creativity.
It's all the stuff that i've i've already has ever done. Okay,
are you as excited about music today as you were
back then? Yeah? I think I think that, Like I
said earlier, I think every generation picks up the tools

(01:26:09):
of a generation and starts making music. But one can
argue that certainly in the sixties and seventies music drove
the culture. There was music and radio. Certainly, for the
last twenty five years there's been technology, and as big
as music is, I will argue that technology drove the culture.
What is music's place going forward? Well, you know, you know,
of course, I've I've seen you. You're right that a lot,

(01:26:32):
and I agree to a large degree. Although, by the
way I said to Dug the engineer. When I came
here today, I feel like I'm in the Abbey Road
of podcasting because you know, to me, this is not
about me, this is about you, because I'm so inspired
by everything you're right, and and I listened to every
one of your podcasts. But okay, okay, but um, you know, yes,

(01:26:54):
I think that more kids grow up today idolizing tech
entrepreneurs and want to be an tech entrepreneur. Probably then idolize,
you know, so called rock stars and want to be
so called rock stars. But I also think that you know,
the historically, the people of our generation, uh and and
the music that we're we're into. It's easy for us

(01:27:15):
to say that music is not driving the culture anymore.
But I don't know if you could say that if
you're a hip hop fan, you know, and if you know,
I would say, with hip hop, and this is not
only about hip hop. To the people it's important to
it's huge. But prior to the last fifteen years, last
ten years, if you were as big as Drake, everybody

(01:27:36):
in America knew Year's songs. This is not a reflection
on Drake. It's just a reflection on society. And it's
not only music, it's hard to get that level of
mind share, and I don't believe the business is adjusted.
And what I also believe is the result of that. However,
much of the mind share of music hip hop gets.
The press and the major labels are focusing only on

(01:27:56):
that as if it were the last century, when all
these other things who that may never graduate to that
level have a greater impact, impact or more self sustaining
than ever. No, I don't disagree with that. I mean,
the amount of noise out there is incredible and and
as you say, if you're inside the bubble, you think
that something everybody knows about something and they and they
don't really right. But in terms of the influence, mean,

(01:28:17):
look at the influence of hip hop's head on fashion. Absolutely,
but it's a language, yeah, but a little long in
the tooth, yeah, for sure. You look at the opinion
of always swings and that there's going to be something
that that that replaces the So the interesting thing is twofold.
We we lived through so many ears. Let's just call
it the MTV era, and it was to a degree
driven by MTV, where they promote one thing and then

(01:28:40):
that would be over. The sound would change completely and
certainly since the beginning of the century, the sound has
been hip hop. Okay, not that it hasn't evolved. So
for those of us who lived through the previous decades,
we constantly expected something to else to come along, and
it has not happened. Not granted, hip hop embrace the
Internet long but for every other genre, if the other

(01:29:01):
genres have, you've been embraced there. But speaking of hip hop,
one thing you've maintained, and we've talked a lot about,
is you believe with songwritings. Yesen's but you also believe
it's about collaboration. Okay, and certainly that's what hip hop is.
Why don't you tell my audience your beliefs about collaboration. Well,
I always I always write your nasty note every time

(01:29:23):
you should on collaboration. Uh, you know the the the
knock on collaboration is it's committee songwriting, right. Well, that well,
it's one thing to have too songwriters, the other thing
to have nineteen Yeah. Well, look that that could be overboard.
But often sometimes that's because there's there's samples in corporate
and I'm talking about how many people are in the room. Well,
like I think about this a lot and for one thing,

(01:29:45):
and maybe they go overboard. Now. I mean, there's a
joke that people say, if you deliver pizza to the
session and you get to UM. But on the other hand,
if you take the Motown era, right, which you know,
my one of my mentors, but Marty Bander, used to say,
arguably was the greatest era, uh you know, or the
greatest the most successful UM creative music scene in history.

(01:30:08):
And there's a lot to be said about that. Um.
You know, you had great records where UM would ended
up being the biggest hook in the record was a
guitar part that the guitar player made up in the
studio as they're recording it. And a lot of times
they never got in your writing credit, right, So you know,
maybe the pendulum was too far that way. Maybe it's
gone too far the other way. But at least there
are people are being inclusive as to people, you know,

(01:30:29):
who's important in the making of the record. UM. But
I will I will stop there though. But the differences,
especially those records, they were essentially cut live, whereas today
many of the hit records are. We worked and we
worked every other people polishing it to try to make
it a hit record. Well, I think that, Well, look,
who knows what goes through the minds of everybody when

(01:30:51):
they're doing this. I think it's there's always the gamut
from people sitting down to make a hit record for
all the way from that to people are sitting down
to make great music and it happens to be a hit.
So whichever way, I think that people are just trying
to have be great, and they're trying to make great music,
and they're trying to make a lot of money at
the same time. Um, most great music, to me has

(01:31:11):
been the result of collaboration of one sort of another,
whether it's co writing or not writing. Look The Who,
for instance, probably a great example, right. I can't imagine
Pete Townsend having a successful career as a singer songwriter
if he hadn't been in The Who. Can't imagine Roger
Dalter having a successful career as an artist if he
wasn't in The Who. And back in those days, um,
the first rung in the ladder was so high that

(01:31:33):
you couldn't get to it. You had to try to
scheme how to get to that first rung. And so
you know, the visual metaphor would be well, one of
this group of people get down in all fours and
I'm gonna stand on their back, and then somebody can
stand on my shoulders and they can grab the first rung.
And so they coalesced into self organized groups of people
to make something that was better than any one of

(01:31:54):
them could do. The whole was great than some of
the parts. And that's what I think all collaborations are. So,
whether so whether it's songwriting, whether it's uh, you know, okay,
well we haven't discussed it quite this deep before, or
maybe I haven't gotten it, And I certainly agree with
that overall philosophy. Let's just say the song now, let's
of course the point being was the lick part of

(01:32:16):
the song? Whatever? But literally, as a publisher, I guess
they're coming in with demonos. They come in with a song.
Do you believe that there are multiple people in the room,
let's just say even two or three, it's better than
having one. Well, if it's the right dynamic, sure, you
know you have you can't have somebody who's a bullying
you can't have. You have to have. There has to
be an OD tour, has to be an O tour.

(01:32:37):
And then whether that's the artist themselves, which in case,
in the case of most of these people were talking about,
I think it's the artist that's the tour who's you know, um,
But somebody has to be the creative brain. It's like
a movie that movies have hundreds of people working on them,
but you will go to see a Quentin Tarantino movie,
you know whose movie it is, even though he's got
a several hundred people working in the movie. Right. So
I think the most all the great music out there

(01:32:58):
has that person. And they're and if they're if they're
doing their job right, they're bringing in ideas from everybody,
and they're they're rejecting the shitty ones and they're accepting
the great ones, or you're they're rejecting the ones that
will fit their vision and they're and they're accepting the
great ones. And uh um. So how could you have
too many good ideas? I don't think you can. And
I think it takes it's very very, very very rare.

(01:33:19):
You have one human being who has enough great ideas
and is a good enough I meanipulating all the elements
of music themselves and can sing or wrap it themselves.
How many human beings in the face of the earth.
Are that good? They can do it all by themself,
not not not many prints Todd Roun, Grant, etcetera. Okay,
so here you are, You've had a storied career. What's

(01:33:41):
your personal dream and your time left? I'm talking about
business ones which may INTERESTCT with personal Um, yeah, that's
a good question. UM, I just want to keep doing.
What I'm doing was just to help inspire, help um
protect uh and songwriters and and and have create environments

(01:34:02):
where they can succeed. And I think, UM, I want
to see so Can continue with the path it is,
which is becoming a globally competitive p r oh because
in the world, that's you know, going back to why
did I go to so canus? Because I wanted to
see it become globally competitive, because um, all the new
licensees are the most powerful companies in the history of
the world. And UM, sooner or later you're gonna get

(01:34:23):
completely lost and nobody will talk to you if you're
not of a certain size, not a certain body of
repertoire that they need certain capability with the back office.
So so Can's on that path, and I want to
help it continue in that path. Um and UH. I
just want to, you know, as I said, help people
make get from pointing to point B. And I've always
been most interested in working with people who had nothing

(01:34:43):
going on career wise and helping them have a career.
That I was interested in in finding people who had
a career going on and helping them get to the
next level. It's it's okay, who was someone you worked
with well, you thought had it didn't make it? Um
multiple depends on the definition that didn't make it was
not did not turn out to be financially successful, have
a sustained career, and the people paying attention didn't know

(01:35:06):
who they were, um I was My answer is going
to be not um not as dire straits as you're
just described, but somebody who didn't get their due commercially
would be a stero um. Those of you that that
have I ever heard of her, No, how incredibly talented
she is and she still still works in the business,
and she's a great person and has um um you know,

(01:35:28):
a lot of good stuff going on, but she should
have been a super duperstar and uh um uh. And
I think that's just one of the things. But the
gods didn't let it happen. Her her original collaborator, DC
McKinney has gone on to become uh one of the
most important influential, you know, producers in the in the world.
And he was a big part of the Weekend. Uh
sound when the Weekend came out. Um, but she's just

(01:35:51):
mega talented. Um. Look, I don't I don't know. Uh.
Even though I've had a career where, you know, my
job was the green light things, I really honestly don't
really know how why some things work and why they
don't right. Uh, I'm fascinated by it, like I always studied,
tried to study green light stories and other industries to
try and apply it to me, you know. But I mean,
I think the two greatest green light stories in the

(01:36:12):
history of the entertainment business for George Martin signing the
Beatles and UH twenty century Fox Ellen Ladd Jr. Or
Giving the green light to Star Wars, and they're both
followed the exact same thing, which is they just had
a gut feeling about the people and standing in front
of them, and there was no science, no math, no data, um,
no thinking, just uh. In the case of of Star Wars,

(01:36:35):
alliad Jr. Uh after um um George Lucas has been
turned down by every movie studio. And after he presented
his treatment and his pitch to Ellen Jr. Ellen Jr. Said, Uh,
I haven't got a fucking clue what you're talking about,
but you're the guy who made her made American graffiti
and that's good enough for me. And I was lucky
enough to meet George Martin a number of years before

(01:36:56):
he died, and I asked him about, you know, the Beatles,
and I said, look, I've read every single thing you've
ever written, every interview you've ever done, but I gotta know,
standing in front of you, what was going on in
your in your head, your heart, and your gut. And
you made that decision. And he said, uh, there's three things. Three.
He had three reactions. His first reaction was that he
thought they were pretty crappy band. His second reaction was

(01:37:17):
there's no evidence they could write songs. But a third
reaction was when they walked in the room together, they
had so much overwhelming charisma that he felt like they
changed the molecules in the room, right, And um, I
think that's you know, that's sort of what it's about.
And uh, that's a that's a fun part about what
we do too is that you just never really know.
And okay, who you most proud of being a midwife

(01:37:38):
to success of Um, there'd be several some forty one
would be one of them. Um uh we again in
my publishing. We signed them when they were still in
high school and they they were brought to our attention
by getting Mark, guy named Marx Costanzo, who was from
a group called Len and they had a hit with
still My Sunshine Love that record. In fact, Mark would

(01:37:59):
be another one because Mark was Lynn was a group
that uh um, they had a um it was a
brother and sister market Sharon and and and the number
of other people, and they had this reputation but I
didn't know they had a reputation of being impossible to
deal with. And in fact, when I just when I
signed them, I got calls from all the record people
in Toronto who said, we heard you just signed Lynn.
And he said, yeah, why and they said I kicked

(01:38:21):
that guy out of my office, you know, and uh
so to deal with them and then to help nurture
that through um, okay, talk him. They could never follow
that up. Uh it's lightning, you know how many how
hit by lightning. I mean, uh, and where are they today,
the brother and sister. Um, Well, Mark still is in
the business and he's it spends a lot of time
in Nashville developing a creative scene around him and down there.

(01:38:43):
I'm sure he's going to break through with it very soon. Um. Still,
my sunshine had half a dozen unbelievable sinks in the
last couple of years. Uh, so I think he's doing
pretty well off of it. Um. But some forty one
was cool because so he kept saying to us, there's
this group that his friend Greg Norri had befriended, and
we got to hear them. When we say, okay, how
do we hear them? Well, they don't play any gigs
during Stone High School. Well did you have a demo? No,

(01:39:05):
and have a demo. So, after a lot of back
and forth, we dectarted to go to their basement in
a suburb of Rontical a Jackson and Derek Wilby's basement
and uh we went down and heard them played two
or three songs and we said, this is amazing, you're
signed and um. And then what happened was Greg Norri,
who was from a band called Trouble Chargers was the
connections between Mark and the band. Uh. Greg thought he

(01:39:27):
was the manager and he came back off the road
and found his band now had a publishing deal and
um and uh he and Mark had a bit of
an argument about it. So Mark left the scene. And
then so we strategized with Greg what to do. We said, well,
since they never really played any gigs, they need to
play gigs in order to play gigs. Didn't meet an
independent record, so let's make an independent record. So they

(01:39:48):
got some factor money, one of support systems. We put
in some money, made a record and which we liked
it so much we decided to change the strategy a
right to the shop a record deal for them, and
everybody in North America turned them down except for an
independent label from Montreal called Aquarius Records. They didn't want
to sign to Aquarius for the world, so they kept
that interested in the back pocket. And then we kind

(01:40:09):
of just stumbled along for a long time, and we
got all got really dejected, and finally the band came
to us and said, we think we know what the
problem is, and we said, what's the problem. They said,
everybody just listens to our demo and they think we
sound like Link one Nity two. They don't understand what
characters we are, so we have to present that dimension.
That's pretty smart. What do you want to do about that?
While we want to make an independent ePK. And they

(01:40:31):
used to uh yeah, they were the kind of kids
that had at those days of camcorders. They had a
camcorder welded to their forehead wherever they went. They made
all this footage we would now called jackass type footage,
but it didn't exist in and and these guys would
have been monsters on YouTube if if it had existed
them And so anyway, they took all that jackass type
footage they added together in a seven minute masterpiece that

(01:40:52):
was to this day probably the funniest thing I've ever
seen in my entire life. So we got that to
the labels and everybody changed turned around because of the
rest in the band. They now understood that their characters.
Remember one time, Lee Lust and our guy from Electro
came today. So he was a great guy. So he
came to Toronto. He was the first day and our
guy that flew to the Toronto just to meet the band.

(01:41:13):
And so I told them, I said, listen, guys, where
this guy's coming in. We're gonna go to dinner selfishly.
It's going to be near my house. It's an Italian restaurant.
It's a little bit she she and I was just
kind of beating around the bush and then they go,
you mean you want us to not dress like slobs?
And said, well, yeah, if you could, no problem. So
the next day I picked Lee up the airport. We
go to this restaurant, Italian restaurant, my neighborhood, and we're

(01:41:34):
waiting and waiting, waiting and finding the band shows up.
You could tell they showed up because it was a
commotion at the front door. And they had gone to
the good Will store and bought these like mafia don
junior suits, pinstriped suits and that trench coats. And they
walk into this Italian restaurant that dressed like mafia dons
with the trench coats hanging off their shoulders, and the
everybody in the restaurant just stopped what they're doing to

(01:41:54):
stare at them. They and there was a big commotion.
Then the maitre d like took their jackets and them
up and they sit down and then what do they do.
They reached into their suit jackets and they pull out
toy gun and put them on the table and the
waiter almost dropped entirely a tray of drinks. It was
the funniest thing I've ever seen, you know. And that's
the kind of guys that that was pretty satisfying to see.

(01:42:15):
That happened in the lens thing. And in three days, Grace,
I suppose would be another one because they learned how
to write songs in my office. Um. Gavin Brown was
the writer producer that I had signed, and uh, we
had a new studio that we built in the office
and he said, like, found this band, there's nothing worth
listening to him, I want to take them in to
see what we come up with. That said okay, sure,
So it took him in the studio and they had
they had like a sound and a vibe, but they

(01:42:36):
didn't really have a you know, great strong songs. And
so every day they would emerge from the studio that
come my office, play me the songs and I said
it's okay, And they looked dejected. And they go back
in the room with Gavin the next day and you
can see the look in Gavin's face that he was
trying to tell them they weren't ready yet either, And
eventually it came in with something that was really good,
and I said, wow, that chorus is amazing, and they
started high fiving each other and I said it'd be

(01:42:57):
good enough to be a verse and they said, well,
what do you mean. I said, well, it's good enough
to be a verse. Now you gotta write a great
chorus that's even better than that. And they said it
has to be that good and I said yeah, and Bob,
I'll never ever forget this. You could see the lightning
bolts go from between person to person, and from their
eyes you could just feel the energy in the room

(01:43:18):
that the switch had been flipped. The next day they
went in the studio with Gavin and they wrote I
Hate Everything about You, which is the deal that got
them the record deal song and got them the record deal,
made their career happen to this day. They just they
broke last year. They broke the record of Val van
Halen had I think fourteen number one rock records in America.
They got sixteen now and it's all driven by the

(01:43:39):
song because they got the whole songwriting thing right. Michael
has has been wonderful. We got great insight into Canada
your career. They more the plum, but for now we're done. Alright,
well thanks, okay, until next time. This is Bob s

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Bob Lefsetz

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