Wayne Forte

This is Wayne Forte's fiftieth year in the business. As an agent he's represented acts as varied as David Bowie and Tedeschi Trucks Band. We discuss his career as well as NITO (National Independent Talent Organization) and the lobbying for and distribution of monies during Covid.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome back to the Bob Leftsett's podcast. My guest today
is longtime agent Wayne Quorte. Wayne, you emailed me that
it was the fifth anniversary of NIDO, the National Independent
Talent Organization. Tell me what NIDO is.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
NIDO is an advocacy group formed during COVID right at
the outset actually, which is now about one hundred and
forty members of independent managers and independent talent agents, so
basically talent representatives.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
Okay, And how did it get started and what does
it do?

Speaker 2 (00:55):
So just as COVID set in, I should say, ar
who was a twenty twenty I guess in April, maybe
second or third week in April, when I guess most
of us realized that we're going to be home for
more than two weeks. Frank Riley from High Road Touring
sent an email out to a whole bunch of agents.

(01:18):
You know. Copied on the email and asked he said,
I said, actually that he had had some conversations with
some of the large promoters. He was involved with a
call conference call possibly and they were, you know, discussing
what was going to happen, you know, what what could

(01:39):
be done? What was you know, the you know, the visions,
the idea, what was ahead of us, you know, that
kind of thing, things that we were thinking about at
home individually, all on our own, and asked if we
were interested to have a conference call to discuss it,
which everybody immediately said yes, because we all had no
idea what was coming up and how we were going

(02:00):
to stay open and how we were going to stay
in business. So we had one or two calls, you know,
like a check in, and then we checked in like
a week or so later, and you know, maybe on
the third call or so, somebody said, hey, maybe we
should form an organization, and which was interesting because we

(02:20):
were really at the time about sixteen sixteen or so
agencies at the time. Let me back up a second,
So these were all agencies at that point, so about
sixteen of us roughly agencies, and I think there were
nineteen people because a couple of them had two people
on the call. We were all competitors day to day,

(02:47):
competitors spoke to you know, maybe a couple of us
spoke to each other, but really, you know, didn't spend
any time together, didn't really you know, didn't go out
to dinner and hang out, so to speak. You know
some of us, some of us were friendly, but I'd
say sixteen we weren't necessarily and what had happened was
due to this you know pandemic. We all realize that

(03:07):
we're in the same box or the same boat, and
all of a sudden it became kind of a brotherhood.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Okay, it's independent. Who is independent and who does not
qualify as being independent?

Speaker 2 (03:25):
So the independent definition is you know, a little bit loose,
but not at the same time. So it's no, no
internationally owned you know agency, So not like an agency
here that's owned or controlled by a group in London
or Canada. Let's say, no corporates, you know. No, it

(03:48):
has to be at least fifty one percent minimum fifty
one percent owned and operated. So it can't be you know,
something where it's just a you know, an adjunct or
a you know, a subdivision or whatever you want to
call it of a corporate. We can't be controlled or
financed by a fund or a bank. We can't be

(04:11):
a public company.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
Okay. Of the one hundred and forty members today, how
many agencies.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Is that roughly half? So what happened from the initial
start was as we when we decided to form a
you know, let's form an organization. We immediately discussed bringing
other people in. Initially we talked about bringing managers in,

(04:38):
tour managers, artists, basically all or any independence that were
kind of out there, you know, they needed a lifeboat,
so to speak, because at this point we were in
survival mode. We weren't looking to thrive, we were just
looking to survive. So we started by you know, picking
up all these people that you know around us that

(04:58):
we did business. But at as we defined it to
become an organization, and as we set our sites to
jump in with other organizations to start lobbying our representatives
for financial help for aid, we brought on lobbyists.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
Well, well, well, let's low down a little bit. You
formed the organization's lobbyists costs money?

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Correct?

Speaker 1 (05:25):
How organized was NIDO and where did the money come from?

Speaker 2 (05:30):
So yeah, and I am jumping ahead because it's all
it's all kind of an entangled ball, you know, like
a bullus spring bull, a string that's all tangled. So
when we decided to form an organization, we decided that
we'd be a nonprofit. We knew we'd had to, you know,
form a nonprofit entity. We'd have to hire an attorney.

(05:51):
This is even before we decided to go into the
lobbyist mode. So what we did was each of us,
each of the companies, threw in fourth thousand dollars out
of our own pockets at the time, and we took
that sixteen whatever it was times for is what sixty
sixty four thousand dollars. We took that, and then we

(06:13):
hired an attorney. We knew were eventually we're gonna have
to have an accountant. We started, uh, you know, we
came up with a name, we started to organize, putting
together a nonprofit organization, nonprofit corporation. We also set out

(06:33):
to form you know, set up bylaws, so we had
to have an attorney to do that. So that's where that
funding came from. And then not too far after that,
or too soon after that, I should say, we realized that,
you know, the only way we were going to really
be able to move forward, if the pandemic was going

(06:53):
to extend for a long period of time, which in
fact it did, we would have to start talking to
representatives about some kind of you know, some kind of
financial funding to be able to keep our staff together,
to be able to keep our businesses together, and we
joined and I don't want to jump too far ahead,
but we ended up joining up with other organizations. The

(07:15):
main one was NEVA, the National Independent Venue Association, who
had already been speaking to Amy Klobachar and she was
speaking to Senator Cornyn down in Texas. And those were
the two that you know, really carried the flag for

(07:35):
the bill that later became s VOG, which started out,
as you know, as something else and again jumping ahead,
but so we started that when we when we realized
that we had to get into that kind of a game,
we knew that we'd have to get lobbyists. We couldn't
do it ourselves. And you know, we couldn't get on
a train and go to DC. Nobody was going anywhere,
so it was all gonna have to be virtual, and

(07:56):
we didn't frankly, didn't know where to start. So we
reached out and we interviewed three different lobbying you know, companies,
organizations basically law firms, and we hired a lobbyist. So
we had some funds to begin, but we knew that
we couldn't at the burn rate of you know, a
monthly lobbying fee or consulting fee, if you like. We

(08:20):
knew that we couldn't sustain. So what we did was
we jumped into fundraising mode. And actually so I at
the time, we also you know, elected officers elected him
by just saying you're so and so, you're going to
be so, and you're going to be so and so so.
Frank Riley, who put the whole thing together, really spearheaded.

(08:41):
It was the president. We had three vice presidents, people
that were you know, actively doing a lot of things.
I became secretary and Tom Chauncey became treasurer, and that
was our executive committee, and we met almost every day.
We did zooms when I said meet, we met by zoom.

(09:04):
We did at least once a day. We we did
the Board of Directors, which the Board of Directors became
the original sixteen. We met at least three times a week.
I have to go back to my notes and look
bit at least and sometimes executive committee we're meeting twice
a day. But we also then broke up into committees
because we had to. There were people talking to the lobbyists,

(09:26):
there were people that were talking to the other organizations.
So we you know, we doled out the responsibilities and
off we went UH and I became, by whatever happened
stance and timing, I became the head of the fundraising committee.
And so we set out to raise funds. And what
we did to initially raise funds was we did an
instrument auction. We went out to managers and artists and

(09:51):
we you know, got UH signed instruments and you know,
something that was laying into closets, something special they never used.
And we did a but three. We did it in November,
I think late November, so we had enough to get
through the end of the year. We raised of that
year twenty twenty, we raised money, raised about one hundred

(10:15):
and thirty thousand dollars. I think we were so one
hundred twenty hundred thirty. We need probably around one hundred.
So once we did that, we figured we had enough
to go for the next year, you know, at least
a year. We didn't Again, we didn't know how long
it was going to take. So it was really a
step by step process, and honestly, it was shooting from
the hip, and you know, meeting challenges every day and

(10:36):
things that we you know, I never did, I never
petitioned lobby you know, we were on the phone at
least two or three times a week with senators, congressmen,
you know, their staffs, you know, giving them the giving
them the pitch, basically just explaining to him what what
it meant to have the you know, the talent not

(10:58):
not around if the agent, the independent agencies weren't around
the independent venues. You know, they both needed each other
to survive. And the independent venues you know in a
lot of markets or a cornerstone, you know, in their
main street or downtown area. We did, you know, we
did a lot of research. We found a study that

(11:19):
said that for every dollar spent on a ticket or entertainment,
it was twelve dollars in the local community. So we
immediately calculated the numbers and you know, figured out, you
know what on an annualized basis. You know, we've just
looked at you did quick you know, math, what what
the agencies generated, with the artists generated and multiplied by twelve.

(11:42):
Came up with some big numbers that the venue association
did the same. And then there were other groups too.
There were the you know, there was the theaters, and
then later there was you know, the the museums. Once
the thing started rolling. You know, Schumer got involved, Centator
Schumer and there was I think eight stakeholders at the

(12:04):
end of the day, and the eight of them all
had their own lobbyists and all worked you know, in tandem,
even though independently to get the word out. And you know,
the Venue organization they had about twelve hundred and fifteen
maybe back in those days a thousand, but they have
almost fifteen hundred members now, and so they had because
they had so many members, they were able to do

(12:27):
like localized things, you know. They had you know, like
state committees and you know, regional things and they'd reach out,
they'd have people reaching out in each state. Obviously we
had less you know, members, but we tried to get
our members to reach out in their states as well.
We tried to get some of our artists involved, and
we were lucky to do that that, you know, some
of them were willing to step up and speak on

(12:48):
behalf of the whole movement. And then backing up a
few steps. As we were rolling along, we decided to
bring members into the organization, sorry, managers into the organization
for the boards. Then we started we brought in two
or three managers today we have about half and half
on the board. Then we had mostly agents, so had
half and half and membership wise an answer to your question,

(13:11):
roughly half and half. But a lot of them are
small operators, you know, one person, two people, small offices.
You know, they're not all big companies. It goes from
red light at the top to one solo operator at
the bottom. So it really covers the span of independence. Really.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
Okay, let's go back to the beginning. It's easily understood
the costs and the losses of a venue as an agent.
And as you were on the phone with these people
beginning in April, how hurt were the agents? The perception
would be your percentage operators. Okay, your costs or overhead

(13:50):
is not that high. What was it like to be
an agent when everything was shut down?

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Well, immediately you think about and you're right, your percentage
a percentage operator. But we're a percentage operator that operates,
you know, day to day. I don't want to say
hand to mouth, but hand to mouth, like you earn
you put out, you earn you put out. If you're
in a major you know, if you're if you're in
a major agency situation or a larger business, management company, agency, whatever.

(14:17):
You know, maybe you generate enough that you have a
huge turnover and you have enough to operate and take
out a huge profit when you're independent. You know, even
even the larger independence if they're a larger company generating
more money, but they have a lot more people. So
you know, in my position, I may have four or
five people. A larger agency may have forty. So even

(14:40):
though they're generating a larger amount of money, their payrolls
a lot higher, their office space is a lot higher,
their travel is a lot higher. So obviously during COVID,
we had no travel, so that knocked that out. There
was no you know, no t and so that was that.
But I still had salaries to pay. I still had
at the time, I had my office space. I was
trying to negotiate my landlord. He would not give me

(15:01):
a break. I was paying the rent every month, and
you're paying your phone bill unless you cut your phones off.
But you know, we ended up forwarding our numbers to
individually to each of the people who worked with me
to their cell phones, so you know, those costs were ongoing.
So it got to a point. I mean, there was

(15:21):
some localized stuff, you know, there was like, you know,
New York State had something, New York City had a
little something. There was the you know, there was the
initial thing where you could file for you know a
certain amount of money. You had to get a bank
to to approve it. The government you know, uh over
oversaw the or backed up the loan. Uh. There was

(15:43):
you know, emergency loans you could apply for. I did.
I got an emergency loan. It helped for some of it.
I'm still paying it off. But you know, you look,
you're sitting there and you're looking and you're thinking, Okay,
who do I have to lay off? Well? Who who
do I have to cut back? What I did was
I stopped taking you know, obviously not obviously I stopped

(16:05):
taking anything. I immediately stopped taking any draw whatsoever. I
just was living on my savings, and I kept continue
to pay my staff, you know, as long as I could.
I figured I'd pay them as long as I could,
and then i'd I'd give them the opportunity to do Listen,
if you need to go try something else because I
can't pay you anymore, go ahead, if you want to

(16:25):
stick around, that's fine. So I didn't have to get
to that point, luckily, but that's what I was looking at,
and all of us were, you know, in the same position,
unless any of us were independently wealthy and could just
keep floating the whole thing. But you're still at that
point in time. You don't know how long it's going
to last. Six months, six years. I mean, honestly, we
all thought it was three weeks and then maybe six months.

(16:48):
And then at the same time of doing all this stuff,
for instance, we were rebooking tours. I rebooked the tours
that I had booked three times during that period because
every time we thought, okay, it's going to be six months, Oh,
it's going to be a year. And I remember when
I said, okay, it's going to be next year. I
remember calling my managers and saying, I'm going to rebook
it for next year. But honestly, I just have this

(17:09):
feeling that it's not going to be next year. I
think it might be two years. So I'm going to
book next year and I'm going to hold the year after,
which is what I did. And I had to roll
into that third one. And then I had one client
who when COVID was kind of over over here or
just starting to Wane, No, unintended. He didn't want to
go overseas and I had an overseas tour. He said,

(17:32):
I don't want to be in Europe, and if there's
an issue, I have to shut down and I have
to ship everything back and pay everybody and you know,
pay deposits on things. He said, I really don't feel comfortable.
So I had to rebook that one the fourth time.
That was the toughest one because it wasn't There wasn't
an easy out on that one. Everybody wasn't Yeah, okay, fine,

(17:52):
they were like, really, there's other people touring. But the
fact of the matter is we didn't know. It could
have sparked back up at any time.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
Okay, So you form the organization degrees, you know, four
k from each individual. What is the goal? What is
the agenda? When do you say and what do you say?
Do you say, Hey, our main agenda is getting money
for the people working for us and for agencies. We

(18:26):
need to get it from the federal government. Walk me
through what the thoughts were then.

Speaker 2 (18:33):
Well, the initial thought was we need to get money
for everybody. That's everybody in the ecosystem. So we were
again we were working along. At the time, we were
working very closely with NIVA. That's before we officially join
the if you want to call it the consortium or whatever,
right the stakeholders as they called it. We were working
with them, and there was other organizations working as well,

(18:53):
and there was a there was a larger bill that
was truck that was being that was put out, that
was trying to that they were trying to, you know,
get through that would have covered a lot of the people,
right the workers backstage and the artists and the and
the crews and all those people. So initially we were
pushing for that. We were pushing it and then and

(19:16):
I guess this is one of the reasons why you
have lobbyists, well two reasons. The first reason is to
be where you can't be, which is Washington, d C.
Or wherever it is. You need to be right talking
to whomever needs to be spoken to. Also, they have
the relationships just as we would if somebody wants a
tour they call an agent because we have the relationships.
They have those relationships. So in talking to them and

(19:36):
discussing it and pushing for it, you know, the feed
what happens is an interesting process. You know, the feedback comes,
and somebody will say, and again, I wasn't directly speaking
to the to the to the congressional people's staffs on
the hill, although we did have you know, our interview
whatever you want to call them, our interviews or our
conversations with them individually set up, you know, strategic to

(20:00):
push certain areas that we needed to push people that
weren't in favor, to try to talk them into it
or explain why they should back it, that it wasn't
just to give money away, but that it was actually
going to help you know, their constituents and their cities
and their areas, because they depended a lot of these
you know a lot of these I'm getting to a
sidebar for a sec but a lot. And I just

(20:21):
had this. I just came back from a conference. It
was there Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. It was out in
mil Milwaukee, and we were talking to some you know
people there and they'll tell you themselves, you know, people
that own restaurants and hotels when when these events happen,
When these concerts happen. Obviously the bigger ones are even
more important, but even the smaller ones. People come into
town from out of town, you know, from the suburbs,

(20:42):
or from at fly in from out of town, depending
on how big it is. They stay at hotels, they eat,
they take taxis, they park cars, they pay babysitters, They
go to the local pharmacy, they go to CV, you know,
whatever it is. They they're there spending money, you know,
because this thing's happening. Take away them movie theater, which
was also going to go down the tube. That was

(21:03):
one of the other stakeholders. Take away the movie theater
and take away the concert venue, the theater or the club.
Let's say it's a theater in a club and a
movie theater. Take those out of the system. And what
are they going downtown for? To shop? To a restaurant?
But they go to restaurants when they go to shows. Right,
A lot of people, not everybody, but they're going out
because they're going out, you know. They're parking in garages

(21:24):
because they're coming in to do that. Yes, some people
come into park to go shopping. But they may come
in and go shopping. They may come in and see
one of the concerts. They may stay over the weekend
and go to a theater. You go to the theater
one night and the Broadway Theater groups were in on
it too. They were one of the stakeholders. So, you know,
getting back to your question, we were trying to get

(21:44):
more of a broad thing going, but word came back
to us that it wasn't going to go through. That
was the word from the hill. They said, you can
spend your time doing it if you want, but it's
not going to pass. They said, there's this other bill
that looks like it's going to pass. It it's more focused,
it's more on the you know, the venue use specifically
because of the reason I just explained to you. You know,
you take all those venues away, and in some towns,

(22:06):
you know Sixth Street in Austin, Texas, what happens if
all those clubs are out of business? There is no
Sixth Street, right, You take some of these you know
clubs out of business, you know the Greenwich Village, right,
all those clubs go out. You get some pizza places
and some restaurants down there. But what else you're gonna
do down there? No jazz, no pop, no you know,

(22:26):
in indie music or whatever. So so that bill was
seemed to be that, Yeah, that one bill seemed to
be or thought of a bill. Proposal of a bill
seemed to be gaining traction, so we focused ourselves on that.
We figured, we've got to cover something, you know, we've
got to be able to keep this thing going as

(22:47):
best we can, because at the end of the day,
if there are no tours, those other people and there
are no venues the other people were trying to help
aren't gonna have jobs anyway. They're gonna be looking for
other work. So this at least keeps them in a
place where they can have a job, you know, the
potential of having a job. So we decided to jump

(23:10):
on that bandwagon. And that's where the you know, where
as I said, these eight major stakeholders started focusing was
to try to get this through and then the you know,
in the end it did go through.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
Okay, you talk about the consolat ship and you talk
about the stakeholders. There's NEVA, there's NITO, who else, if anybody.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
There was an organization I think called NATO, which was
the I think National Association of Theater Owners, right and
that and that was I think movie theaters. Uh, there
was the Broadway League or a Broadway group. Right, there
were Broadway theaters right there with that group. Later on
there was the museums and the aquariums. I don't know

(23:48):
if they had a specific group, but there was that.
That was a that was a Senator Schumer thing for sure.
I'm trying to think there was eight of them. I
don't remember them all off hand.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
So in a perfect world there we kum bay ah.
But certainly Broadway tends to look down on certain things.
Certain things generate more money as agents. How big a
seat did you have at the table? Into what degree
we listened to?

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Well that was the interesting thing, Bob. So how big
a steed I don't know, But the reality is we
had a seat, and we never did and even if
it was a small seat, we had a seat, and
we had a voice, and it was listened to. And
we had to just not sit back and let the
lobbyists do the talking because really they have the seat
right at the table on the hill. But we got

(24:35):
you know, as I said, we were on the phones,
and we were when we broke up into groups. You know,
our people from New York would get on the phone
with the New York representatives, people from Nashville would get
on the phones with the Tennessee representatives. I live in Connecticut,
That's where my home is. I was on the phone
with the Connecticut people right and on the call. I
arranged the call, and I had a couple of theater people,

(24:56):
I had a promoter or two I had myself. So
the idea was to bring you know, the different groups
together so they could hear from all of us. They
could hear from the theater directly, they could hear from
the promoter directly. They can hear from the agent. Oh,
and they had a manager. So we tried to have
as many you know, people as we could on the
on the phones and they listened, so we had a voice. Yes,

(25:16):
we did have a voice.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
Okay. When the bill was ultimately passed, where were the
agencies in this and how did it ultimately play out
with the money?

Speaker 2 (25:26):
Where were the agencies? What do you mean by where
were the agencies?

Speaker 1 (25:28):
Okay, there was a pool of money. You had to
apply for the money. Correct, there were all these stories.
You heard for sure, they're going to run out of money.
Then you heard that not enough people were applying at
the end of the day. How did it work out
for the agencies?

Speaker 2 (25:45):
So the agencies and the managers, Okay, the talent, let's
call it talent representatives. Okay, let me step back one
more step, just to clarify or whatever add to the story.
So when we focused in on talent representatives, agents and
managers did so when we set up the organization because
our lobbyists suggested to us that when you're dealing with

(26:07):
the hill, you need to be again, you need to
be focused. So talent representatives, agents and managers, no matter
what sports music wouldever have the same NASIS code, okay,
which is the code that you use your company or
yourself use on your tax return. So my company, a

(26:28):
management company, whatever, sports agent, et cetera, we all use
the same NASIS code. So we went by that code.
Anyone with that code can join our organization basically, and
so we formed it based on that and it became,
as I said, talent representative. So theoretically we could have
sports agents and managers joined too, because we're a talent

(26:50):
representative or talent organization, international organization. So for the talent organization,
roughly there was sixteen billion in the bill, okay at
the end of the day. Initially they had a number
they were looking at and they were there was going
back and forth and the conversations were is it enough money?

(27:13):
You know? And the initial number that they came up
with is what you're discussing or alluding to the original
number that they came up was thought to not be enough.
What they asked for was each of the organizations to say,
how much do you think you need okay for you know,
to repay and to stay open for whatever period two years,

(27:35):
whatever that period was, I don't remember off the top
of my head, but you know, for this period and
they and they were periods. It was set up with
the SBA overseeing it, and there was like these this
period that you had to apply for within that periods
certain income and it had to reflect you know, going
back I think two or three years or something some
an average and I have to pull out my notes
to see what the thing was. It was. There was

(27:56):
a lot of calculating going on and you had to
go through you know, a uh request, you know uh
uh process. They set up a website for it, which
crashed initially, by the way, and everybody's freaking out because
you had the time period within to register. Uh. So
there was so at the end of the day they

(28:17):
did they estimated, re estimated and estimated again, they came
up with the number of six billion. That was for
all of these different scenarios. Okay, the talent representatives ended
up with around nine hundred million dollars the independence. Okay,
roughly that was our share, so just under a billion.

(28:38):
The rest of the money, I couldn't tell you where
it went, but you know it was all those different scenarios.
The theaters, the quariums, the museums, the movie theaters, you know,
all those things.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
Uh, you know.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
Broadway, That's where all the money went. You applied for it,
you got the you got the grant if they if
you were approved. And then what they did was they
had additional funds available. They did after everyone applied, which
again is probably what you're referring to. It's almost like

(29:12):
we had too much. But maybe it's because some people
didn't apply, maybe their numbers didn't work out, or maybe
their calculations were overestimated. I mean mine were pretty tight
and what they weren't questioned, thank god. And I got
what I you know, what I applied for. And so
they did a second round. After that, there was like

(29:33):
a supplemental phase you could apply for and you know,
at the end of the day. I'm not sure exactly
how much was used out of the sixteen billion. But
there's also something I learned, you know, in the whole
government process, like once they they approved something and they
decided that's the number, they don't want to give it back.

(29:53):
They didn't want to say, oop here, put it back
over here, which I think is ridiculous. But hopefully nobody
shoots me for saying that on this but I think,
you know, honestly, I think it's ridiculous. But so it's like, Okay,
we have too much, you can have some more, but
you know, it goes according to you know, what it
was you applied for. So it wasn't like you got
double your money. You got like a little bit extra
over here. But you know, I, you know, I got mine.

(30:14):
And before you even asked the question, and I don't
know if you're going to I'm going to answer it.
I had gotten to a point when I realized this
thing was going to go for a long time. I
had a conversation with my staff and I said, I'm
not going to lay anybody off, but I'm going to
have to cut back for right now because I've got
to try to work within my means, I'm not going
to take anything, but I'll need everybody to reduce like

(30:35):
twenty five percent of something. Is that okay? And everybody
said yes, that was fine. So I did that and
we went along our merry way. Everybody got paid, but
they got paid at a lesser, lesser rate. And then
when I did get the money, I sent checks to
everybody or wires and I paid them back for the
money that they didn't they didn't get. And I had

(30:56):
one of my one of my employees who actually called
me and said, why are you sending me this money?
I said, because I owe it to you, And I said, no,
you don't. I said, yes, I do. I owe it
to you, so keep it. Do something. I don't care
what you do with it.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
So essentially everybody was made whole.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
More or less.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah, okay, let's shift gears a little bit. Neither. The
Venue Association just had a conference and they put out
a report. I believe the number was sixty four percent
of venues don't make money. How the hell is it
a sustaining business?

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Well, they're saying I was at that conference, by the way,
that's where I was this week. They're saying that that
it's not a sustaining business for them, and that you know,
twenty five or thirty percent of their members are going
to go out of business at the rate or something
like that. I don't want to be quoted on it,
but that's around that number, which is not just similar

(31:55):
to what was happening overseas in the UK. They lost
a you know, a a good portion of the bottom
segment of the business. And you know of the of
the small clubs and you know, small small, even small festivals.
I mean they've had a number of them just shut down,
go out of business. In reality, it see the problem

(32:18):
and I'm not going to defend it because I'm not
in that business, so I can't defend it, you know,
I can't say, yeah, it's true, they're you know, they're
all sixty five percent not maybe they're not operating properly,
but but it's not. It's a it's a difficult business
to sustain for a whole number of reasons. People are
drinking less, that's the reality, especially the younger generation, so

(32:39):
they for a long time depended on bar sales. One
of the arguments that the ACT, and I'll just say
this as a talent represented one of the arguments is
that the acts charged too much. Okay, the deals are
what the deals are. If a venue or a promoter
doesn't want the act, they can say no. The artist,
you know, either needs or or commands a certain amount.

(33:02):
A young artist on the road today and I said
this at the conference too, in a meeting that I
had with a bunch of their people, I said, if
you don't realize, and maybe you don't, a young artist
today on the road needs about a minimum roughly of
about twenty five thousand dollars a night. And I'm talking
on low level, not on a even a medium level.
You need about twenty five thousand dollars a night just

(33:23):
to sustain and that's making no profit, that's just paying
to be on the road. Back in the day, as
we call it, the old days, labels subsidized that for
new artists and for the ones that had new albums out,
they got some subsidy as well. But these artists today
that are going out and there's really no record label
to subsiden I mean there are record labs, but not
subsidizing anything. These guys are subsidizing it on their own.

(33:46):
So where are they making their money, making their money
on merch sales like that's and when I say making money,
maybe they make a profit. I had a client on
the road recently and their profit was all in their
merchandise sales. That's where their profit was. They made nothing
at the end of the day from what they took
on the road. So the whole segment of the business
is difficult to sustain, not just theirs. But I can

(34:09):
understand it because people either aren't going out as much.
They also stay a lot of them, not all of them,
stay open multiple nights a week because they you know,
they want to be open, they want to continue the business,
but their bar seals being down, and then they're increasing
their price on drinks to make up the difference, and
then people are buying less. They may be drinking, but
they're buying less because beers were ten bucks, maybe now

(34:30):
they're twenty so or whatever fifteen and so maybe instead
of three they buy two, or maybe instead of two
day buy one. So there's that issue. Rents are going up,
insurance is going up. You know, their fees just continue
to increase, and there's only a certain amount they can increase. Tickets.
I'm talking about the smaller level. I'm not talking about
the high end, talking about the bottom end. I mean,

(34:52):
they can increase them, but this is a certain point
which is which it becomes the diminishing returns. Right, keep
increasing ticket prices, then you get lesson less people, and
then they're back in the same boat that they were before.
So it's a listen, it's a business I wouldn't want
to be in. I can tell you that it's a
tough business.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
Okay, let's go back. The act has to get paid
twenty five thousand dollars a night.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
No, no, a week, a week a week.

Speaker 1 (35:18):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah, that's just to cover costs. I'm talking about small.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
Okay, So let's just flesh it out a little bit. Yeah,
if it's twenty five k a week, how many people
in the bands? How much infrastructure, how much you know, equipment?
What are we talking about If it's a being outfit
for twenty five k a week?

Speaker 2 (35:37):
Okay, I'm talking about it again. I'm talking about a
starting act because as they get a little bigger, it's
more expensive obviously for things that you're saying right now
are alluding to. So let's just take you know, an example.
So you got a five piece band, you got two
people with them on a road. So that's seven okay, crew,
that's tour manager crew. Merged that like all and two

(35:58):
people are doing everything van. They're driving around a sprinter van.
Their gear is either being pulled in a in a
van or it's in the sprinter but probably most probably
in a van. So it's not there's not a lot
of gear. It's a drum kit. Let's say, there's keyboards,
there's three amps, there's some guitars, not a lot of stuff.
They're doubling up in hotels mostly right, they're not in singles.

(36:21):
I mean I could, as I said to them when
I was talking to a bunch of the you know,
club people, I was saying, look, they could sleep six
in a room and driving a funky old van that
breaks down all the time. But you know that's not practical.
So so they you know, they're paying a little bit
more for let's say a sprintter van, a little bit
more room. But some of them, some of them are
in just a nice van, but it's a van and
they're driving around, and you know, between paying for gas

(36:43):
and paying they got to pay salaries, you know, unless
it's a band splitting, what's left which was one of
the clients I had. And at the end, as I said,
they only split the merchandise. They didn't make a profit on,
you know, from ticket sales. So they're driving around, they're
doing gigs, and if you think about it, they're working
five nights a week. They're driving two hundred and fifty
to three hundred miles you know, between gigs. Maybe more,
but probably not because they're not in a tour bus.

(37:06):
You know, they've got to be paid basically five thousand
dollars a night, and a lot of these bands are
getting the grand. Like what about an opening act, it's
getting five hundred bucks. Okay, maybe it's not twenty five.
Maybe it's seventeen to five for them because they're sleeping
six in a room, but still get paid five hundred
bucks two hundred and fifty. How are they making it work?
They're not. They're not. They're barely living. They want to

(37:28):
do it because they want to do it, but you
know they're they're not living. You know, it's tough.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
Okay, there are many multiple levels here. Let's start with
the beginning. You are a talent representative. The acts you're
talking about, it takes twenty five k you have a
number of issues. You have the band wants to do
it because it is hard work, you have to find
somebody who's going to pay for it. And then you
have the venue saying we're in the red. So how

(38:04):
does this play out?

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Well, this is this is what happens every day. So
they're not saying every day, every single day, oh, we're
not making any money. We don't do it. They obviously
need the talent, they need to have shows, They need
to have performances because they need to keep people coming in.
So they do. However, you know, you can only use

(38:29):
lack of a better term, you can only squeeze so
much blood from a stone. So you know what they're
saying at this point. Why they put that report out,
or one of the reasons they put that report out
is you know, to show that they're not you know,
they're not making bank over there. You know they're not.
Oh man, we're all you know, we're going on holiday,
we're going to Aruba. Was shutting down for a month.
You know, we're doing great. Some of them are probably

(38:51):
doing great, right and some of them are doing terrible.
But the ones in between are probably just making it,
you know, because it's tough. So how does it play out?
It's you know, like every day, you know, it's like
people go to the store, they buy food, they come home.
When they get home, you know, depending on what kind
of job they have, they have to decide what kind
of food do I want to buy? How much do

(39:11):
I want to spend? Do I buy an extra this?
Do I go it out to a dinner more than
once a week? Do I? You know what I mean.
It's like budgeting. But they still have to keep doing things.
They got to get to work. And when you know,
the and you're living in New York City and they
decide that they're going to increase you know, the metro
card or the you know, the metro system from you
know two ninety to three fifty, and they're going to
increase you know, the George Washington Bridge from you know

(39:33):
whatever it is now ten bucks or nine to fifty
or whatever it is to cross to you know, fifteen dollars.
Or they have the you know two fifty surcharge now
for driving below sixty fourth Street in Manhattan. All these
little things for many people don't matter, but for the
working guy, working woman, that's a big hit. Very similar

(39:55):
in the clubs, very similar for the acts. So so
we do the business. They're going to you know, I
just said they're going to work. They're doing their thing.
But you know, maybe they skip a lunch, maybe they
have less to eat. You know, who knows. They go
out less. One thing always affects the next, and so
they going out less obviously probably affects the clubs, the
movies and whatever. But we play out, you know, we're
talking and making deals all day long. The fact of

(40:17):
the matter is at the end of the day, they're
having to do things to make up for it. As
I said, I probably charging more for drinks or increasing
the fee, increasing the ticket price. The point is they
have to do something. So how it plays out is
is a constant negotiation back and forth. They're not going

(40:38):
to not buy talent because they won't be open if
they do that. But maybe they buy different talent, or
they just say I can't afford it, I'm not taking
this act, or yeah, And what happens when those things happen,
Bob is a lot of developmental acts are the ones
that suffer, right because they now either have to go
to smaller places locally, and maybe they don't get any guarantee.

(40:59):
They just to play for the door, which a lot
of brand new bands do anyway, and it starts to
kind of warp the system, you know, instead of being
able to build it up. You know, play this place,
in this place, in this place, in this place. Makes
it a little bit more difficult if the ones in
the middle are getting really choosy about what they buy,
and it's like, you know, I don't want to take
a shot on this. I don't want to take a gamble,

(41:20):
you know, I can't afford to lose money. That starts
to affect it. So it how it plays out is
it does affect the system. It kind of sets it off,
you know, off rhythm if you like, it's still happening,
but it's not happening exactly like it was.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
Okay in the old pre Live Nation days, if you
were an agent and you booked a tour and the
promoter got hurt, you would give money back for two reasons.
A to keep the promoter in business. Sometimes these people
were teetering. Also when you came back through, they would
book you. So to what degree does that occur with

(41:56):
independent venues? You're all independence In this case, there's no
big backstone. So you have an act, it goes in there.
You need your twenty five k a week, but they
draw a fifteen or twenty percent crowd. What do you do?

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Well, that's a loaded question, but I have to unpack
it piece by piece. So back in the day, preleb
Nation days, it's not that everybody that lost money got money,
but I could. It all came down to relationships, and
a lot of it was with the act and the
manager right, not necessarily specifically and strictly with the agent.
Although yes, there were some of those relationships where agents

(42:34):
might have gone back and said, hey, give them some
give them, you know, give a second thought to this
because they got really hurt. But usually it was that
they really got hit and that was you know, that
could have been anything, that could have been, you know,
a storm. I mean today's world, we have it all
the time now, but a really bad storm came through
and everybody thought it was gonna be great, but in
fact there was torrential downpour unless people showed up than normal.

(42:55):
But it wasn't just a club venue. It was like
a big place and there was like big money on
the line, and so you know, they would get helped out. Sometimes,
not all the time, but sometimes in today's world, I'm
sure those things happen, but not so much for me.
I can't speak specifically, I because when I'm making the

(43:16):
deal I try to make I try to make certain
that it makes sense for everybody. Am I one hundred percent? No,
nobody is, But I try to make sense. And I
think some of the independence, if not all of them
I'm talking about the talent representatives, have the same sort
of thought.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
It's not about how much can I get at the
end of the day. Yes, we'd like to get as
much as we can, but it's not just about Okay,
let me get as much as I can't worry about
the rest of later. It's about, you know, does it
make sense if I'm going to get this, is it
going to make sense or not? And yes, there's going
to be a time when you have something that happens
that you can't anticipate. You know, no different than booking
a tour and than a hurricane comes through and you

(43:55):
lose three shows. You know, it's nothing you can do
about it. You know, weather's weather, So in this instance,
you just try to be cognizant of it. At least.
That's that's what I try to do. I try to
be cognizant. I try to set the deals up to
they make sense. And at the end of the day,
if you can, if the one of the managers that
one of the meetings that we had this week actually
put it in a in a very good way, and

(44:17):
he said, as long as I can make for lack,
I'll just use an example, he said, if I can,
you know, if I can, if I can earn seventy
percent of the door, at the end of the day,
I don't care how I get there. I don't need
it all up front. Okay, as there are people that don't,
that don't think that, don't believe that, and don't go

(44:39):
by that. But but he put it out, you know,
in a way that made sense, which is it doesn't care.
As long as he's making what he's got to make
and what he needs to make and what he'd like
to make for his client, he's happy. You know, whichever
way we get there, whichever street leads down to there,
go around the corner and come back, you know what
I mean. So does it happen yet, I'm sure it does.

(45:02):
I try to I try to avoid it if I can't,
you know, I try to avoid it.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
Okay. So we referenced the old days where the labels
gave tour support, they bought drinks. It venues today. In
the old days, pre internet days, a all the action
was outside the house. You needed to go to the
club to socialize. Okay, you want it to be out

(45:28):
amongst people. You don't need to do that today. In addition,
on a developing act, we would hear about an act
and he went to the club. The price might be
cheap ten dollars back in the day, because you heard
about the act, you wanted to see it. That was
the only way to see it. Maybe there was one
song on the radio, whereas today we have Spotify, we

(45:52):
have YouTube. Is there a future and what is in
the future of developing acts for them? The bottom up?

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Well, this is and yeah, that's that's a good point
and a good statement and actually kind of reverts back
to what we were talking about a little while ago.
That's another thing that's affecting these clubs. You know, it's
not the same, you know, the two things rather and
it's been years now, so it's not like it's just
doing it this, you know, like the next last two years.

(46:23):
But the whole record company thing that probably happened towards
the end of the or mid nineties, probably, I would think.
But you're right. And back in the old days, the
labels bought seats, they bought drinks, right, they bought tickets, right.
They didn't ask for comps. Starting probably in the early
the mid nineties, they started asking for comps, like they
didn't want to buy tickets anymore. Right, that's when all
the artist development stuff kind of went out the window.

(46:46):
In today's world, I don't know that they do anything.
I see them occasionally putting tickets on hold. They don't
even pick them up, you know, they put them on
hold to buy, but they don't pick them up. So
there's not that support. So when you take that out
of the you know, out of the out of the system,
you know, that affects you know, these clubs as well.
So uh and and you're right, Uh, the urgency so

(47:07):
you know, going back to our time, you and me,
the urgency was like you heard about it, you heard
a track at your friend's house, right, like I got it.
I got to see this band, we gotta go see
we gotta go see them? Did you see. By the way,
did you see the uh you saw the led Zeppelin doc? Right, Yeah,
I'm sure you did. Okay, So I was a big fan.
I remember hearing them that. Somebody played the track and

(47:29):
I was like, oh my god, this is you know,
it's just what we're talking about. It's like, you have
to go out and get the album, you gotta go
see him. Not so much now, yes, but some of
that's going on. I at this conference there was a
young woman I think she was she was involved with
the club. I think she might have been involved with
the club, and she was, you know, saying, oh, I
heard this new act and you got to check them out,

(47:51):
and it's really good. I just overheard her having a conversation.
They're really great, and I'm going to go out and
see him. I mean, there's still some of that, but
but not at the level that there was, because you're right,
there's alter aternative stuff. There's a lot of people that
and my daughters did this when they were in high
school too. You know, when it's ticket sale at ticket
prices went up, you know, and started getting you know,
higher and higher. They started on the movies more because

(48:15):
it was cheaper back in those days, they were probably
seven fifty you know whatever, the fifteen bucks now. But
you know, there's a lot of people that I know
that have movie passes, right, so they can go as
many as they want. They buy them monthly. So yeah,
there's a lot of alternative stuff. Plus, you know, there's
TikTok and there's you know, Netflix, and there's you know,
zooming with people and whatever. So there is a lot
of competition for that, you know, for entertainment. So in

(48:37):
answer to the question, it it's really difficult. I can
tell you it's difficult to establish an act and quote
unquote break it, as we used to say in the
old days, you know, get them to a point where
you can build an audience for them because there's so
much else going on. There's so much distraction. And some
of them, depending on the music, you know, what genre

(48:57):
they're in, it happens for talk, you know, those girly
pop singers, right, the female pop singers, right. A lot
of that's TikTok driven and all of a sudden boom,
they have a huge crowd. And some of it's not
you know, just happened yesterday. Obviously, some of them were Disney,
you know, people, and they came up and you know,
the kids were watching them on TV for five years,

(49:18):
so there's that base. But if you think about it,
that's the same system, only it's different now, right that
was our system, like they built. They built it from
the ground. They saw them on TV. You know, they
lived with them, they grew up with them, and all
of a sudden, now they're on stage at Madison Square Gardens,
so they've known them for years. It's not an overnight
suc sensation. So in trying to build it from ground

(49:41):
zero with none of that happening is extremely difficult, extremely difficult,
And for that reason, there's not a lot of headline
new headliners coming through. There are headline obviously headliners coming through,
but not a lot of new ones, not a lot,
not multitudes like they're used to be. There seems to
be a lot in the middle, and there's a whole

(50:02):
lot at the bottom that are trying to get up
and break the ceiling or whatever you want to call it.
You know, those waves that we had, except you know,
again putting the pop thing over to the side, because
that's its own entity now, which is interesting because when
I started in the business, or actually before I started
the busines when I was a kid, then when you
were a kid. But that was the thing, right, the
pop thing. I wasn't a pop guy. I was more

(50:23):
into the album tracks, but you know that was the
pop thing. Oh one single, I gotta go out and
see them, you know, blah blah blah. So that's what's
happening now. So growing, it's a real process. It's on
the road because there's really no record action happening. You've
written about a lot of this. Bob. It's working it
and is trying to build an audience and it's you
know and literally building them because you just don't find

(50:46):
them by accident. You don't roll into town and all
of a sudden there's a thousand people that come see
you. You know. It's not like it was you know that
happened to hear it on the radio and you didn't
even know they were there. You know, so much different.
It's a it's a much more grueling game, and you
have to you have to take time. There's a lot
of hit and miss, you know, and there's a lot
of for me anyway, I have to spend a lot

(51:09):
of time, you know, thinking about it, like are they
going to work over here or not. Do I really
need to go out to the Midwest and spend and
have the act spending twenty five let's say, if it's
a new young act, twenty five grand a week to
work out there for we're not going back for two years.
Or do I better off working over here near where
they live, you know, doing it regionalized. So I think
there's more of a you know, I think this has

(51:30):
to be more thought behind it.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
Okay, let's say you're booking clubs, independent clubs. In terms
of the negotiation. How much negotiation is there? Is it like, okay,
here's the fee, and then what percentage of merch they take?
When you're negotiating with an independent venue. What are the
deal points?

Speaker 2 (51:51):
Well, those are Those are a lot of the points
that we were discussing actually at the conference, which is,
you know, there's a couple of ways. There's multiple ways
you do it. You can go in and say, hey,
this is the feed, take it or leave it, and
you know, I just I just want this and I
don't care about anything else. Or you can go in
and you know you can you can build it from
I need a minimum of this, and then I need
to be able to make this at the end, so

(52:12):
and structure it, you know, on a basis where you
can earn it if you if you if you draw
the people right, you earn it if you earn it,
so to speak. The merchandise is again one of these
tricky areas because the venue wants to have a piece
of the merch You know, back in the day, the

(52:32):
artists rolled in and they had a guy that walked
around selling shirts and it was like, okay, we sold
some shirts, you made some money. Or maybe it was
as the kids were leaving with the fans, they'd sell
it to them on the way out right, not the bootleggers,
but actually the artists people, right, they'd be selling them.
And then merch merchandise became a thing. I mean now
there's merchandise companies. Back then it was just then printing
their own shirts up. So you know Whi's been for

(52:54):
a long time. But you know now big conglomerate merchandise companies.
So the merchandise can be as I said to you,
for the younger at it's really important. As I always
saying to some of these you know, venue operators, the
merchandise could be profit and loss you know, that could
be the difference in them making any profit. But even
more than that, some of these acts, especially if like

(53:17):
I said earlier, these opening acts that are getting paid nothing,
that's how they pay for hotels and fuel. Like if
they if they're giving up merchandise or a large percentage
of it, that's that's money they need to operate. They're
not making a they're not making a profit. They're they're
on the road because they want to be or they
think they're going to be successful. Want to be successful, right,
or they just love playing music. They're they're using that

(53:39):
to help them sustain themselves. Like maybe they can stop
in at Burger King instead of skipping a meal because
they have merchandists. I'm not trying to pull anybody's you
know what, do you get the tears rolling here? But
that's the reality. Some of these guys are like, oh shit,
if I you know, if we can sell some merch uh,
you know, we're good. Because the fuel in a hotel,
all right, maybe we're gonna have to stay all in

(53:59):
one room. Sel sub merch maybe can have two rooms,
you know. For the smaller acts, that's the level it's at. Frankly,
for larger acts. You know, again, we want to talk
about the top ten percent. That's a whole different story.
You know, that's a corporate, you know, profit game. That's different.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
Okay, let's stay with the small venues. It's in the
smaller venues that the ticket fee looks outrageous. If there's
a twenty five dollar fee on one hundred dollars ticket,
you don't like it. If there's a twenty or twenty
five dollars fee on a twenty five dollars ticket, everybody's unhappy.

(54:46):
So talk about that.

Speaker 2 (54:49):
Well, yes, and something that we've been talking about lot.
The reality is, you know, from our perspective, fees have
gotten out of hand. It used to be there was
a fee, a handling fee, right, There was a ticket
fee because they had to print it out and you know,
sit mail it to you or whatever. So there was
a handling fee, there was a printing charge and whatever,

(55:12):
and then the fee became you know whatever, it was
a dollar. I think it's actually going back. There was
there was no fees to the to the fan. The
fees in the old days, the fees were charged to
the show. You paid. I don't remember the number of
fans ten cents whatever. It was a ticket and it
was charged to the show as a show cost. Okay,
and then Fred Rosen came along. You know the story.

(55:36):
I don't even have to tell you, but I'll tell
it on the podcast. Fred Rosen came along, and I'll
and I'll I won't say I made it happen, but
I will take some of the hit for this. He
called me on a particular tour of one of my clients. Actually,
somebody had him call me the client that I had.
We were we were going on tour and ticket Tron

(55:56):
was doing it. Remember ticket Tron of course, so ticket
ticket Tron was doing the you know the ticketing back then,
the computerized if you want to call it that whatever,
you know, mechanical ticket issuing or whatever. If you didn't
go to like your local record shop or you didn't
go to the box office or whatever. They were handling
it a lot of them. And somebody called me and said, hey,

(56:17):
you got to talk to this new company. It's called Ticketmaster.
They can do it better, they can do it faster,
blah blah blah blah. I said, okay, right, so I
talked to I talked to uh Fred. I quote Fred
up when we had a conversation and he said, you know,
I want to do I want to handle I'd like
to do all the tickets for the whole tour. And
I said okay, but I said, I don't want to
have to pay a fee. I don't want to tour

(56:38):
to pay a fee for it. He said, okay, don't
worry about I'll take care of it. I said, how
are you going to take care of it? He says,
I'll charge the buyer. I said, oh, that's a good concept.
I never heard of that concept. He goes, yeah, charge
I don't know, it's twenty five cents or something or
ten cents or something. I said, okay, that sounds great.
And so that happened there. So you know, the next

(57:00):
time I had a actually I had a conversation with
him a bunch of time. But the next time I
got on the phone to talk about ticketing, I was
trying to get him to reduce his fee that he
was charging for the buyers. And this was probably two
or three years later, and he hung up on me
basically because he was like, screw you, find somebody else
to do your tickets. And I went, wow, that was
a quick turnaround for it. But that was just you know,

(57:20):
then it just went from there, right, it escalated. So
in today's world, what does it cost to actually issu
your ticket? Eighty five cents? Maybe? Okay, so when you're
charging fifteen dollars at thirty five or a hunt or
probably doesn't go higher than that. But fifty yeah, okay
if it's on a really huge ticket, I guess, I
mean it doesn't matter. But the conversations we've been having
with with you know, with promoters and buyer and venue buyers,

(57:44):
is why don't we just why are we doing this?
If it's twenty five bucks for the ticket and thirteen
for the fees you know, ticketing fees, venue fees, whatever,
so it's thirty eight dollars, why don't we just put
thirty eight dollars down to figure out how to split
it up? I want to do fifty to fifty, I mean,
like what makes sense. Like let's at least engage the conversation.

(58:05):
Because back in the day before it was all the
expenses and ticketing fees and all the rest of it,
you know, it was the deals were simple. It was
X amount of dollars guaranteed versus fifty percent, and it
went to sixty at a point and maybe seventy at
a point. And that was like later on when everybody
figured out there might be more money to be made.
And it was simple. There was no you didn't have
to have accountants on a road, you didn't have to

(58:26):
do any of it. It's like, okay, this is what
we're going to do. So you know, and I know
for the larger tours, just still otive accounts. But I'm
talking about for the workingman's band if you want to
call it that, or a workingman's group. So that's some
of the conversations we've had. We've been having because you know,
it is kind of out of hand. It's it's really
like I have this over here, and then you can
split this and so then what then we as agents

(58:46):
or managers have to go back and go, okay, then
we'll do this, but we're going to keep this over here.
You know. It's like, let's just put it all here
and figure out what it is. You have the venue,
we have the act. If the act didn't come into
the venue, there'd be nobody there, very few people. Okay,
not every venue, but some or most they're not coming
down to hang out at an empty venue and drink

(59:07):
beer or drink drinks at the bar if nothing's happening.
Unless it's a bar, you know that they have talent
in but it's also a hangout bar. But if it's
a place that's actually a showcase for talent, they're not.
Nobody's coming down to hang out without talent. So there's
a reason people are in there. So why can't we
take it from that position? You know, you've got the bar,

(59:28):
you got you know this, you just just make it easier,
make it simpler. It's it's kind of I was sitting
at the meeting we were having conversations about at Milwaukee,
and I was sitting there thinking, this is like two
countries with you know, uh military, you know weapons, right,
you're going to have you know, dis missile. Then I'm
going to make this bomb. You're going to do this.

(59:49):
I'm going to do this. It's just like, can we
just cut it all out and just have nothing? We
won't attack you, you don't attack us. How about that? I mean,
I know that's unrealistic, but uh that's the way I
feel something.

Speaker 1 (01:00:01):
Okay, ticket Master, when we're talking about Areena's large values
that are they pay these advances. They rationalize the fees.
Let's just talk about that conceptually. We'll get into details. Leader.
When you have an independent club, how they rationalizing these

(01:00:22):
large fees.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
Cost of operation is one. They need this guarantee to
their bottom line, you know what I mean. So it's
again it's like, okay, this parts are so we know
we have that we're gonna sell x amount of tickets
all year or you know, average right on a year,
so we know we have this much coming in. So
that's one reason. And some of them, honestly, I don't
know for sure, but maybe some of them get advances

(01:00:48):
from the ticketing companies. I'm sure they do. It's probably
the same thing, just in a smaller, smaller way, right,
because they're not all ticketmaster venus. I mean, there are
a lot of independent, you know, small ticketing companies, although
a lot of those are being bought up, so you know,
and I'm sure they go, if they're smart enough, they
go and get advances on their ticket money to operate.

(01:01:11):
And so they're doing the same thing that the larger
places are doing. They you know, it's already in there.
So they're charging the fee because they've you know, they've
taken this money. They're charging the fee. They're legitimizing it
because they've got to repay the ticketing company and they
also want to make a profit. So the fee. I'm
not saying it's all going to Ticke company, but part
of it probably is, and then some of it's coming
to them, and some of it maybe's going to promoter.
I mean, I don't know what their venue deal is,

(01:01:33):
you know, for every date, every show, but they may
they may have a deal like that. You know, you
come in, your partner with us, will give you a
piece of the ticketing.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
Okay, let's flip the script a little bit. Let's talk
about Titesky Trucks. You're the agent. They're playing bigger venues
now at this point in time. You know, we'll go
back in time. But they have an overall deal with Live.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
Nation right now.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
They do, yes, Okay, So what are your feelings about
overall deals, touring deals?

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
You know, it really depends on the situation, and it
depends on the you know, who's doing it and what
they're capable of doing. There's other than Ticketmaster sorry, Live Nation.
There are other people out there trying to do these
kinds of deals, right. I mean, Age obviously has been
doing it for a while. We'll take Louisina out of
it for a second, because that's kind of a different scenario.

(01:02:29):
But you know there's other people doing it. There's you know,
a venom now in America is trying to do the
same thing, right, the ticketing company from Germany. There's been
promoters that, you know, independent promoters that have tried to
do a similar thing. Some of them now are backed,
you know, by bigger money to do a similar thing.
So my question always is as an agent is excuse me,

(01:02:52):
can they can they take the place of the local person,
you know, the local promoter or and or you know,
the local marketing piece people like if they're living in
I don't know, a city to Buke, Iowa. Let's say
the promoter's living which probably isn't the case, but let's
say they are. Are they going to know what's happening
in Newark, New Jersey? Probably not. You can in today's world,

(01:03:14):
you can do marketing the social media obviously, if you
can do it anywhere in the world, right, that's not
a surprise. I mean, you could even buy time on
radio from anywhere. Really, if you want, although there's little
of that being done. There's not so much print being done,
so it's not a matter of doing that. But when
and where? When when that was still happening and there
was these kind of national things going on, I always

(01:03:35):
question are they getting the right deal? You know, do
they have a deal where the local guy might do
they know all the ins and outs locally? Do they
have do they know the jocks at the station, or
are they're just calling up sales and you know, ordering spots.
So to me, there's something about having the person in
the market, especially when you're developing an act. So maybe
when an act gets to a certain level, it's just

(01:03:56):
all right, we're putting the show on. Okay, there's still
things that happen to be done, and there's still probably
marketing it needs to be done as well to make
sure that you're doing the business or increase the business.
But you know, as you're coming up, are they going
to have the same wherewithal Now from a live nation perspective,
they do have offices in virtually older major cities, so
you can say that they have their localized people right,

(01:04:18):
So maybe that makes you know, that makes more sense
than somebody that's doing it, that just says, oh, yeah,
I'm going to call you know, I'm gonna call the Beacon,
or I'm gonna call Madison Square Garden and book the
Beacon and I'm going to do a show there. But
I live in Minnesota and there's people doing it all
the time because it's easy enough to do these days.
You know, it's not like it was in the old days, right,

(01:04:38):
And you know, they'll fly in if they have to,
or they'll hire somebody to go cover the date. It's
a lot of these guys that are people around there
that are doing and there's not lots and lots of them,
but there's quite a few now that are doing like
these tour deals or whatever. You know, they're hiring somebody
to be like the tour manager. So and they're on
the road, you know, covering the shows because they you know,
the promoter's doing other stuff too, so he's not going

(01:04:59):
to be able to cover all the shows. I mean,
back in the day, you know, there was Larry Magott
and Philly. There was Don Law in Boston. There was
Ron dels Are in New York. Right, your guy had
the city wired, he had all the stuff locally wored
and maybe that's part of why the developmental thing isn't
as strong as it was. Maybe that's a little bit
part of it. I mean, there's other reasons obviously the

(01:05:19):
radio stations, record companies, et cetera. But maybe it's because
it's gotten so nationalized. We're losing out on that, you know,
we're losing out on the guy or person that's developing
that act, you know, for that region like you know,
Philly around the Philly area or Pennsylvania or whatever, you know,
whatever you want to call it, the metro New York
City area or you know Syracuse and Rochester, New York,

(01:05:43):
where before you had somebody working on because they wanted
to develop business. So the independent you know venues now
have kind of taken over that role, only they don't
all have that wherewithal you know, financially as well, some
of them, but not all of them. And they also
if they're running five six nights a week or more,

(01:06:05):
some of them run seven. If you're running five or
six nights a week, that's that's really difficult to do.
You know. Back again, back in the day, they were
doing maybe a show a week, maybe a couple of month,
you know, and then eventually they had multiples and they
had to hire other people. But still they weren't doing
you know, they weren't doing three hundred and sixty five
shows a lot of them. Right these venues now are

(01:06:27):
you know they're running They're doing two hundred and eighty
or whatever. You know, I mean, I know one venue
close to where I live that there's one hundred and
thirty seven okay, small theater, right, so that's a lot
of shows. If they were trying to do the rest
of the country, how would they you know what I mean,
how would they concentrate on what they're doing locally? So
that's that's my general feeling on that. Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
The old logic was if I go independently, the promoter
has a relationship. If I have I'm a good draw,
I can make more money. But I could have a
bad date for whatever reason, turns out I'm soft in
the market, it's weather whatever, blah blah blah. Whereas I
made an overall deal, my money was guaranteed. Then you

(01:07:13):
have the Michael Cole paradigm. What he started was I'll
pay you the money, don't ask me how I make
my money. Okay, And so if there's an overall tour
deal today. I mean Arthur Fowell works there at Live Nation.
Michael Cole is not a part of that. To what

(01:07:35):
de do you just say, Okay, I negotiate the biggest
number I can and I just leave the rest of
the air. And to what degree can you control them?

Speaker 2 (01:07:46):
Well? Okay, so again a lot to unback. I guess
when you get to a certain level, it's like, okay,
I'll just I'll give you a a an example, but
not in the business, not necessarily for that. And then
I'll answer the question. If you have a business, you
build it up. You're an independent and you know you're

(01:08:08):
a businessman. Rather you start your own business or an entrepreneur.
You build your business up and you get along, you know,
later in life, and you decide, you know what I
need to I'm working like crazy. I'm banging my head
against the wall making sure everything happens properly. Somebody comes
along and goes, hey, you know what, I like your business.

(01:08:28):
I'm going to give you, you know, ten million dollars
for it. You think, yeah, but this is like my family,
blah blah blah. Then you think, okay, how long do
I have left Okay, I'll take the money, and then
you know, you've got to be on for whatever it is,
three to five years, and then you can do whatever
you want. Maybe you stay, maybe you don't. So I
think with with not everybody, with certain situations in this

(01:08:48):
business as well, you know, you get to a point
where it's something that I was mentioning before. So I
had a client, as I said that, you know overseas,
was concerned that, you know, during COVID, that they'd be
over there, COVID would come, everything would shut down and
he'd be stuck on an island and have to pay
everybody and pay to get everything back and whatever, and
basically lose his ass right because there would be no shows.

(01:09:11):
He was concerned with that. So when you're operating that
way with some of these acts, and a lot of
them do, even if they're larger, and you and you
can realize that, or you realize that if I make
this deal, I could just take care of I don't
have to worry about that. I'll take the money, and
you know, I don't have to worry about anything else.

(01:09:32):
I don't have to deal with anything. It sounds easy, right,
but sometimes it's not that easy. It's not always that easy,
but it seems that easy. But for them, maybe it
makes sense. You know, let me take the check and
you worry about it. They still have to do their
show and do all the rest of that stuff. But
maybe they're thinking, I don't have to worry about anything
else now they deal with it. But as you alluded to,

(01:09:54):
most of those deals are yep, don't ask me what
I'm doing, because I'm gonna do whatever I have to
do to make it up. I mean, that's the reality.
I do the same thing. I just gave you ten million.
Don't ask me how I'm gonna get it back. I'm
gonna do whatever I have to do to get it back. Now,
different for me than some is I just don't have

(01:10:14):
it in me to do whatever it takes to get
it back. I'm going to try to do it. You know,
the way I feel is right, But that's just because
of who I am. But it's still leaving it out
there because you even if you think you have controlled,
you don't have one hundred percent of control. You know,
you have to give something up. It's why I gave
you that example of the business, because even though you

(01:10:36):
see I'm taking a Timley, and they say to you,
you can run it the way you want. You can
do whatever you want. Don't worry about it ain't gonna happen.
You think it is not going to happen. I just
told some friends of mine a couple of years ago
who were out looking for money to you know, invest
in their business, and they go, we're gonna get this,
We're gonna get that. And I said, let me let
me say something to you. You think that that's going

(01:10:58):
to answer all your problems and answer every you know,
the questions for you, and you think you're going to
have control. But if somebody gives you ten million dollars
or twenty million dollars, they are going to want control.
They are not giving up control. I'll give it. I
don't care what they say. I don't care what when
they put that agreement together, you better read it really carefully.
Now I speak from experience because my business prior to

(01:11:21):
this was a partnership with you know, with an agent
that we you know, started the business together very much
the same as I did this one, very small, built
it up. It was very successful. We made a joint
venture and it was great, and we expanded and we
did a lot of great things and whatever, and for
the most part, we were we did what we wanted

(01:11:42):
to do. We still had to ask because it was
a fifty to fifty joint venture, but they agreed until
the administration changed and then it was like, what are
you guys doing? We don't understand. Why are you doing this? Why?
And then it was like, okay, we have to do
this over here to expand, and we're going to need
this much money. Well, I don't know if we want

(01:12:04):
to give you that money to do that, you know.
And then things changed overnight and I was sitting thinking, Okay, now,
what how do I get myself into this? So it
sounds good from the outset, but if you take the check,
you're giving up control.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
Okay, let's go. When a step before, before there was
an overall deal for Tedesky trucks, what would be the
negotiations and what were those tours like?

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):
Well, see, so the Tedesky trucks are or however, you
know whatever, It doesn't matter who the act is. But
in my you know, theory, not just my personal theory,
you can you can probably do the same either way,
you know what I mean, You can do the same

(01:13:04):
sort of things and probably have basically the same business
either way. But as I said it, maybe it may
look easier to do this right because you either have
to do less work, you have less risk, and that's
a lot of it is the risk. So you do
this and there's less risk, and maybe you just end
up at the same place at the end, you know,
or close, or maybe you're a little bit ahead. So

(01:13:26):
that's good, you know, Is it twice as far ahead?
I don't know, you know, it's still to be seen.
I think a lot of those big tours and I'm
not avoiding the answer the question. Rather, I'm trying to
I'm trying to give you more of a full answer.
Like a lot of those tours that are you know,
the what do you call it, you know, the tour deals, right,
the big packages. We're done for a lot of different reasons.

(01:13:48):
One of them, you know, one of them maybe was
on creativity, you know, based on creativity, because they felt
like if they made this deal and somebody was producing
the whole tour, they had more control on the creative
side because then they could roll in with whatever they
wanted and basically just do what they want. Well, it
doesn't not necessarily, but maybe closer, you know, and maybe yes,
maybe at the end of the day you'll get almost

(01:14:09):
as much, sorry, almost one hundred percent of whatever you want.
And then another reason again was risk. You know, you
want to somebody wants to take on a situation and
they want to have, you know, put out a bigger show.
There's a huge risk in that, you know, a risk
getting into it, and then you probably come out okay,

(01:14:29):
but you're still risking coming in because you've got to
you got to finance it. So maybe that's the other
reason is the risk, as I said earlier, so risk
is a big thing as well. Now, so the question was,
you know, how of the negotiations go. Well, when when
you're dealing on forty or fifty shows independently, you're dealing
with you know, each promoter office, it's a little different
than you know, having a tour deal, so some of

(01:14:51):
them may be the same places that you're playing, but
it's coming in as you know, an overall tour deal,
so you're not necessarily negotiating each of the to the
dates individually. At the end of the day, the shows
will be the same, you know, the earnings may be
higher maybe or may be the same, but again the

(01:15:12):
risk is out the ability to coordinate things from one
place who is attractive to some people. The show is
still being done virtually the same way. I mean, it
may change in certain people's cases. As I said, you know,
it may be that they're out on the road and
they want it. You know, Like I had a client
the other day that said, oh, if I only had
somebody that would finance the whole tour, I bring screens

(01:15:36):
and I'd do this, and I do that. So there's
a reason why they would do it because they want
to put on a bigger show. You know. I don't
even know if they're thinking about at the end of
they making more money. They might be, but I think
they're thinking about presenting a bigger show and the investment
it takes to do that, you know, up front. So
I think that may be a lot of the reasons.

Speaker 1 (01:15:55):
Well, let me let me be clearer. Okay, Yeah, prior
to making a little we're all deal with Live Nation
with Tedesky Trucks. Let's take that off the table. If
there were fifty dates, did you work with fifty different
promoters and have to negotiate fifty different deals? Yes, Now,

(01:16:16):
when you're making a deal. I have literally sat with
the promoter where they have the computer, and they show
me the two sets of books. There's the one they
send to the act and the one for them. So
the one that goes to the acts as they're in
the red, the one that's in the black, theirs, which
they don't show the actions that they made money. So

(01:16:37):
from beginning to end, how do you get I mean,
it's constant war between agents and promoters. How do you
make sure you get the most money and don't get screwed?

Speaker 2 (01:16:51):
How do you make some Well, if I'm gonna just trust,
there's no way to make sure. Bob, how do you
know your bank's not stealing from you right now? You
have no idea?

Speaker 1 (01:17:07):
Well, you know, as you talk about changes in the business,
they sent out these two accountants whatever who were more
line by line, and we're arguing it more as opposed
to trust. Now you have to pay that person and
sometimes there's not enough money or else the advance is
so big, you know they have to steal from you

(01:17:28):
in order to make it work.

Speaker 2 (01:17:29):
But even if you're going line by line, okay, okay,
if you're if you're in a settlement, and you're going
line by line, they go, the advertising costs this much,
and then they go, here are the receipts. Well, how
do you know you're going to call every radio station,
you're going to call every newspaper. Well, first of all,
this is going back pre today. Let's say, you know,

(01:17:49):
going back ten years, fifteen years, whatever. The local guy
has a deal with all those people. Why because he's
doing volume right today. It's in the agreements, right, it
says any disc count afforded to us does not go
in the deal. It's right there in black and white.
So that immediately admits that there has always been discounts,
but we suspected that anyway. Of course there's discounts. And

(01:18:12):
those re seats like are they real or did they
get are they computer generated? Or? I mean today we
can make anything on a computer.

Speaker 1 (01:18:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:18:20):
So that's why I say this trust involved. Because you
look at it and you could go line by line
by line, that doesn't mean the reality. I remember back
when the tour account started going out, they were counting
seats and venues, right Literally, it'd go around counting the
seats to make sure you know, blah blah blah blah
blah to make sure the seats were there, and then
they'd say, oh, there's five more seats. Well, okay, so
you caught them for five seats, but what else is

(01:18:42):
going on? Like, you can't, you can't, you're not in
the box office. You don't know what's really going on.
It looks good, and yes, you know at a certain
level you do need somebody out there doing that. You
don't want to just blindly go through it. But there
is a large amount of trust involved in the meantime.
What you're saying about the double books is funny because
I brought that up in one of the meetings I

(01:19:02):
was having this past week, and it was like, and
they were shocked, what do you mean?

Speaker 1 (01:19:06):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:19:07):
You know it happens. I know it happens. But also
if you own it, see so part of the differences
I think, I think, but I didn't see the books.
You saw. You know what you saw. If you own
a venue, right, or you control a venue, you can
show the actual show, maybe losing money, right, the selling

(01:19:28):
the tickets, people coming in and sitting okay, But then
the question becomes, all right, but what else is there?
So that's in the red and that's what normally we
see but what about you know, again, depending on the venue,
it's like the sports venues or you know, the arenas today,
you go in there and none none of the boxes
are in the manifest, right, none of the special you know,

(01:19:49):
annual deals they do are in the manifest. You know,
there's all of that. So so that could be part
of it. Right, They go, Okay, we're making money because
we've got you know, parking, and we've got the bar,
and we've got this, and we've got the ticketing feed,
and we've got the venue fee, and we've got you know,
our club seats, and we've got our members and all
the rest of it. So you know, they look at
that and they go, okay, we made money, but we

(01:20:10):
lost money here. But you know, that's but that's part
of that model, and it's been developed, and that's why
you know, there's certain entities that you know that are
out you know, building venues and making venues and and
you know, some of these club the larger club guys
control multiple rooms. What we see as a settlement on
the show, we don't see the settlement on the business, Like,

(01:20:32):
what's the real settlement on the business. We never see
that really you know Jake Gold of course, right, So
Jake told me a story and I know you love
this because you love Jake as I do so Jay.
When I was representing the Tragically Hippy years ago and
I started to represent them in Canada, Jake used to

(01:20:53):
tell me stories about when they went out on the
road and sometimes and I told this story actually to
somebody this weekend at the not this this week because
it was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at the conference, because they
were talking about the bar and the tickets and whatever.
So Jake used to say to me, you know, if
a club owner doesn't want didn't want the act in
the early days, I'd tell them, you can have the
act for free, give me the bar, because I knew

(01:21:13):
people were going to drink. And I'd say yeah, and
then you know, I remember going to the shows and
I'm thinking, Jesus Christ, they do drink, you know. And
so he was willing to trade the door for the
bar because he knew that they were making more money
in the bar than he was making at the door.
So you know that's my point, like, well, he knew
because you know, Jake is Jake, and he probably you know,

(01:21:33):
went in there and you know figured it out. He
probably counted the people and how many drinks they had.
But you know, we don't know what the business is doing.
We just know what we're seeing, you know, we're seeing
It's like the airlines. You know, they go, well, we're
losing not anymore today because they weren't making money, but
we're losing money. Well, why you lose money? Well, fuels, this,
this is this, this is the so now they're charging,
you know, for baggage. You want to sit over here,

(01:21:55):
you got to pay this. You want an upgrade, you
want to pay this. You want to get on early,
you pay this. They figured out it's the same sort
of model. It's the same model. Hey for extras, let's
do upgrades. Let's do all of this, right, you got
your normal guy. How many people want to sit in
the very back and be the basic economy? Not many,
So they say, here's basic economy. It's not bad. You
can fly to Chicago for three hundred bucks, but bags

(01:22:17):
fifty dollars early. You know, on the plane twenty five bucks.
Sit in a seat where you can actually put your
legs out right, that's another fifty bucks. And just keep
doing that. It's all add ons.

Speaker 1 (01:22:29):
Okay, in these larger venues, you know there's a law
now you have to show the overall price. But as
an agent, what about negotiating in terms of the ticket
prices and the add ons on these bigger buildings.

Speaker 2 (01:22:48):
Ah, that's ticketing things. You know, there's a never ending
conversation or battle. Honestly. First of first of all, the
the all end price was a good concept and principle,
but I don't think it is in the actual everyday usage.
I had a manager that called me the other day

(01:23:10):
and when it took effect in New York, and he
said he got a something from a fan that they
were playing somewhere. It was like the ticket was fifty bucks.
I think it was fifty five something like that, and
they flipped it to all in pricing. So the fifty
five dollars ticket became sixty eight. So the fan was

(01:23:31):
emailing saying, I was going to buy a ticket, but
you increased the price to sixty eight. Well, the artist
didn't increase the price. Price is the same. The fees
increased the price and it went to all in ticketing.
And depending on what platform you're on. And he was
explaining to me on the particular platform he was on.
It doesn't show you that until you check out. It
does give you all the fees when you check out,

(01:23:51):
but not until you check out. There is I understand.
I haven't been on all the platforms, and this was
a big conversation in Milwaukee, and on one of the
platforms it shows you upfront what the fees are. I
still don't think that the public really understands that, nor
do I think we could really make them understand it
or get them to understand what it is, because they

(01:24:11):
think it's the artist, and the artists in the you know,
in the larger scenarios maybe be maybe controlling the overall. Right,
they may be able to say, and I'm talking about
the big one percent or top ten, whatever you want
to call it. They may be able to say, here's
what I want the ticket to be, and the fee
has to be no more than this and this and this.
They can control that because honestly, you want that tour,

(01:24:33):
that's what you do, or you don't get it. So
they probably do control that. But for the you know,
working man's act or the working act, as I say,
then they can't control that. So you know, they decide
they want a twenty five dollars the ticket it ends
up being thirty five. You know, it's probably more than
they should charge for that particular act. And there's no

(01:24:53):
real way to control it because you got the you know,
you got the fees for the building, get the fees
for the ticketing company. And we just went through why.
You know, it's advances, it's splitting it with somebody, it's
whatever it is. It doesn't even matter anymore. It's the
fact that they're there. So all In was supposed to
quote unquote solve it. All it does is just lump
in one lump sum. And so the good part about
it is you can see what the price is and

(01:25:13):
you go, you know what, that's too high. I'm not
buying it. Whereas before maybe if it stated, you know, whatever,
it was fifty five dollars or if it was a
seventy five or whatever it was, and not like ninety eight,
you look at it and go, okay, I'll buy that.
Oh there's these fees and that's like tax. It's like,
oh shit, okay, you know, okay, I'll have to pay
that at the end. But you see them. The argument was,
or at least from our standpoint, is a talent representative.

(01:25:36):
We wanted everybody to see the price, to be aware
what you're paying and what the fees are for. We
wanted them to know the artist is charging this and
these are the fees, so you're paying that because of that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:50):
Okay, what's your view on authorized resale? Ticket Master says
the ACT has the right to turn that off R on.
I've heard, you know, not my personal experience. I've heard
from some agents that ticket Master turned it on. They
weren't aware of it. They had to call them to
them to turn it off. What's your philosophy and what's
your experience?

Speaker 2 (01:26:11):
Experience is very similar to what you say. I've had it,
you know, turned on without without knowing, and then you
call it turn it off, and I haven't. It hasn't
happened recently. But when it started to have out, they
turned it off initially and then later said no, we're
not going to turn it off, and they they reverted
to we'll keep it off until it gets to ninety

(01:26:32):
eight percent, then we're turning it on or some percentage
I don't remember off the top of my head, and
then we're turning it on automatically. The thing is that
Once you get to that percentage and it turns on,
that just opens up the floodgate because then everybody has
tickets can put them up on resale, and if the
bots have them, and if whoever has them, all of
a sudden boom, there they go. So my philosophy on
resale is I okay, my personal philosophy. My personal philosophy

(01:26:56):
is resale is fine. It should be at face value
with a minimal up charge whatever whatever you want to
call it. You got a ticket for one hundred bucks
or let's say one hundred bucks, two tickets to go
somewhere your friend can't go, you're going on your own.
You want to resell it, resell it for one hundred,
maybe you get one hundred and ten or whatever. Okay,
to me, that's fair. But when you have it and
you're reselling it, you're getting two fifty for it, that's

(01:27:19):
not fair. But the other side of the argument is
the act should to charge two fifty to begin with. Well, okay,
there's always two sides to an argument, and yes, some
of the acts are charging more for tickets. But again
I get back to the my statement about you know
it feels like you know two countries with war weapons. Right, Okay,

(01:27:40):
now we're going to charge two fifty for the ticket,
and now it's three seventy five on the resale market
because it just goes up again. Right, it doesn't stop
if we change.

Speaker 1 (01:27:49):
We've experienced with Beyonce and a couple of other acts
now where the reseller's secondary market got killed.

Speaker 2 (01:27:57):
Well, they did because they overbought, right, overbought.

Speaker 1 (01:27:59):
So there is a price like the Stones. The Stones
go out, they charge the most. There's really no secondary market, Okay,
because the tickets are so expensive, they flex price them, etc.
The viewpoint from the artist has historically been that it
is bad for us if the ticket is expensive. As

(01:28:23):
you say, there's two sides the argument. Yeah, you say
that tickets under price, secondary market gets the uplift. Do
you think at this late date, where as they say,
the level of sophistication is complicated, the public will never
understand the fees, but the public understands what the value

(01:28:45):
of the ticket is. There's always somebody who says, I've
been listening to this band for twenty years, I should
be able to sit in the front row for fifty bucks,
And they're all over complaining it's like you know, when
Springsteen went over more than one hundred dollars, all those
people complained. Meanwhile, they go to dinner for more than
one hundred dollars a person before the damn show. Once

(01:29:07):
the show played, nobody cared, not to mention not every
venue was clean, major markets were clean, whatever, blah blah blah.
No at this laid date, is it really going to
hurt the act if you charge what the ticket is worth?

Speaker 2 (01:29:24):
Yes, I mean I think so, But again, let me so,
there's two different conversations or two different I don't want
to say arguments, but there's there's two different scenarios here.
For the top level acts. You're absolutely right you can
charge more and maybe they should. Okay, when you again,
when you get back down to like the working bands,

(01:29:47):
that's where it is, that's where it's more most effective
against them, Right, that's where it hurts the most because
if they're let's you know, let's call it a fifty
dollars ticket. When it's a fifty dollars ticket, it's on
resale for when twenty five s they have charged one
twenty five, Well, if they did, the resale would be higher. Again,
now they're not going to be thousands of them on there,
but there might be you know, two or three dozen,

(01:30:08):
or there could be hundreds, depending on the size venue
they're playing. And yes, maybe it'll get overbought as well,
and that happens, but see when that happens, that also
affects the acts because when the when the resellers or
the bots whatever buy up a lot, a huge lot
like that, and they put it up for resale for
again higher than whatever's being charged, and they don't sell them,

(01:30:31):
then they drop the price to get rid of them,
because at that point they just want to dump them.
And then all of a sudden, you know, you're charging
seventy five bucks per ticket. It's on resale for one
point fifty, right, and then all of a sudden they're
available for thirty five and then you know, and it's like, oh,
I got a ticket for thirty five. You know, it's
like that doesn't help us, that doesn't help the artist.

(01:30:51):
So you know, that's another argument too, because that's just resellers.
But and there's not going to be any way to
control this, I know that because they have more money
than anybody has as far as you don't talk about lobbying,
they spend a fortune lobbying. They're everywhere, you know, the
resellers are everywhere, lobbying everywhere. The only the only place
where they got semi defeated was in Maine recently with

(01:31:11):
that main bill that went through.

Speaker 1 (01:31:20):
Okay, let's talk about the main bill, because this affects
certain congressional stuff. The laws on the books. Okay, ye
means obviously a small state, but they have Portland Real
Augustus premate line or market. Yeah, but how the hell
are you gonna enforce it? And they're not going to
put it, give any money to enforce it. So it's
a victory exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:31:43):
The enforcement's the important thing. Look, we got there's a
law in the books not as good as the main
law in New York State, and it's not enforced a time,
right or maybe a lot of the time. You're right,
it's the enforcement. So we were talking again, we were
talking about this in Milwaukee's It's one thing to actually
get a law asked. But what seems like they don't
do is they don't set up the enforcement, you know,

(01:32:04):
like in advance. And if you do this, it's this,
you know, and it's going to cost this. And even
if they say, okay, if you do this, you're going
to be fine. One hundred and fifty grand, Like who's
going out there looking for it and who's doing It's
not gonna be that high, but you know, a thousand dollars,
you know, an incident or whatever, who's going out there
doing it. If they do do that, then these laws
have teeth. You know, then maybe some of the stops,

(01:32:28):
but it's a matter of them doing it. And that's
something that we're working on. That's part of what we're
working on. Part of our advocacy is trying to see,
you know, trying to get some of these things enforced,
trying to change the laws a little bit, you know,
trying to trying to angle them a little bit more
towards you know, in pavor of the Act. And we
have to do the same thing with those people, you know,

(01:32:49):
the representatives that we do when we're when you know,
when we're talking in general, while I'm talking to you,
we have to qualify, yeah, the top one percent or
over here, and they do that and that's okay because
for them, you know, it's play money. But for the
working band, this is important. This really hurts them, and
it's it's hard to get some of those guys to focus.

(01:33:10):
I mean, let me tell you a little side story
on this one too, in two different situations. I won't
say where and who because I don't want to get
anybody in trouble. But so I had a promoter that
I spoke to in a major market in a state
that doesn't have a law you know, about this stuff,
or doesn't have a good law. And I was trying
to see if I could get him interested in, you know,

(01:33:32):
in doing something about it. So I called him up
and it was somebody who one of the people who
worked for him had told me that on one show
that they had sixty percent of the house was bought
by the resale market. Wow. Right, yeah, exactly, that's what
I said. And when the show played, half the place
was empty, right because they didn't all show up because

(01:33:53):
as you say, they probably ought, were you intimated before
they overbought and they didn't show up. So, uh, I
was talking about it, and he said to me, I
have to talk to these guys, you know, because he
knows some of these people. Obviously most of the major
promoters do. He said, Uh, I've talked to these guys,
but the one guy you know, the one key guy
like the resellers, his buddy, Like, that's where he gets

(01:34:16):
his sports tickets. And when he wants to go see
you know, Taylor Swift or Beyonce or whatever, that's where
he goes to get his tickets. He doesn't want to
have to go online and buy his tickets. He just
calls up gets his tickets. He considers him a mom
and pop business. And I'm like, seriously, So that's that one.
And then we had a similar thing in another state
that we were working on where one of the guys,

(01:34:38):
uh that was that we were that that two of
our members were going to to you know, to try
to lobby. He was like, no, I think you know, no,
they're fine, They're okay. You know, they're not bad people.
And you know, because he gets his tickets there, like,
and that's what they do. I mean, they know how
to feed the monster, right. They take care of them.
They take care of them so that they get taken

(01:34:59):
care of. So something that we probably will never solve,
but we continue to work on it.

Speaker 1 (01:35:05):
Okay, let's talk to Desky Trucks. You've been involved with
Derek Trucks from day one. Derek was a phenom he
played with the Almond Brothers, ultimately gets married to susanho
has her own career. They've been going out as the
Tedsky Trucks being certainly in excess.

Speaker 2 (01:35:19):
Of a decade.

Speaker 1 (01:35:21):
In the all days, the pre internet days, the goal
would be to get a record company deal. As you said,
the company would support you as long as you continue
to stay look like you were going to be in
the black and you would have a breakthrough track. It's

(01:35:41):
a little different in the late sixties and early seventies,
but certainly the eighties they're waiting for you to cut
that one track that's going to make it all work
for them. Okay, even the biggest tracks on the Spotify
Top fifty today are not known by most people. So
the paradigm is done. So like Tedsky Trucks. A is

(01:36:03):
it growing? B what is the potential upside? See? What
is the goal? D? What might get you there?

Speaker 2 (01:36:13):
Oh boy, another deep suitcase to unpack? Okay, so yeah,
Tedesky Truck. So it's fifteen years, Bob, fifteen years almost two, well,
fifteen years to the day, probably at the end of
the month, at the end of the year, but fifteen
years and when we started out, and I'll guess I'll

(01:36:35):
start there, wave at me or whatever if I'm getting
too lost in the weeds. But when we started out,
we had an eight piece band. It's twelve pieces now
we had an eighth piece ban That was the concept
they wanted to do. They wanted to take out a band,
you know, full band, double drummers, you know whatever, didn't
have horns in those days, and had two singers now

(01:36:57):
at three so apiece, and so it was going to
be expensive from the outset. And there was no record
because there was a brand new band they just put together.
And this certainly was no hit record, no hit single, right,
there's none of that yet. So the the thing was,
and it was something that I was chomping at the
bit to do for a number of years actually, was

(01:37:21):
to have them get together. Would be like I thought,
this could be it, right, and I think it has been.
But anyway, but as a backup, so I had to
and there was you know, no record company support, right
as you said, I mean there was a record company.
There was Derek's record company who actually put out I
think their first album, and then they moved, you know
after I think after the first album they moved to

(01:37:41):
another label, but certainly no labels are going to do
what has what used to be done right in the
old days, like we were talking about earlier. Right, they
would have been a couple of one hundred grand for
the tour. They would have been a market, they've been
a big party, they would have dropped the record. It
would have been like a you know, pr blitz, like
the whole thing. Okay, So none of that. So this
had to be worked from the ground which in a
way was kind of a godsend because it wasn't going

(01:38:02):
to be a hype and it could be built, you know,
from from the ground up. Both of them had a base,
and it was just a matter of building a beer base.
So I went to people that I thought would be
interested promoters, people who I happened to speak to right
after they decided they were going to do this, who
were hey, what's new? And I said, oh, I got this.

(01:38:23):
You want to know something new, I got something new.
The problem is, honestly, you're not going to make any
money for three years, and truthfully that was my line.
You are not making money for three years if you
do this. Well, why is that? Because I need a
certain amount of money to keep them on the road.
They have to have a certain amount of money each night.
If not, they're not going to work. So it's one
of the others. So if you're in, you're in. If

(01:38:44):
you're out, you're out. It's okay, you know whatever. And
so I had, you know, probably two or three people
that were okay, yeah, I like that, let's do it.
So we started out doing that, so, you know, and
we went out and built it up. I'll skip all
the middle part, but basically we did a bunch of
work the band through over time fairly quickly. They played
a date in New York. I think it was in

(01:39:04):
New York and they invited some horns to come and
sit in and it was pretty good. And I remember
asking Derek after the show. I said, hey, what'd you
think of the horns? He goes they were cool. I said, yeah,
they are, he goes, maybe we should add them. And
I kind of shook my head. I was like, okay,
I mean nod my head. I was like, yeah, that'sund
like a good idea. And so then all of a
sudden they were horns and it became a twelve piece
so and it did, and those early promoters to get involved.

(01:39:26):
Probably I'm sure they didn't really make any money. Maybe
they broke even maybe they didn't, but they were in
for the beginning, you know, and they stayed in there.
So it was built from that level. And it never
was built on records. It was built on touring, which
is basically what's happening now anyway, but strictly built on touring.
And how big could it be? Well, at the beginning,
I remember people saying to me, I can't believe you're

(01:39:48):
doing this. There's no way this is going to work.
Get eight people. Even in the early days, you got
eight people, because don't forget you get eight people plus
the crew. So maybe there was fourteen or fifteen, you
know whatever, maybe fourteen. You got fourteen people on the road.
How are you going to keep you know, two buses
and how are you going to keep that going? I said, well,
we'll do it until we can't, and you know, we
did it, and it built up little by little, and

(01:40:08):
it was a matter of it was a matter of
doing what I said earlier. It was a matter of knowing,
feeling where to go, taking some shots, seeing where it worked,
and it didn't knowing that if it worked over here,
it could probably work over here, and then just kind
of building it up and building it up to the
point where you know, now everybody can you know, everybody
being fans or whatever in the business can walk around

(01:40:29):
and go, oh, yeah, of course Today'skee trucks. Well yeah,
of course, but you know, it's fifteen years. It took
about I had told them when we sat down with
the you know, the then manager, it would take I
remember saying to what we had lunch, I said, I'm
in for penny, in for a pound on this. I

(01:40:49):
think it's going to take three to five years. If
you're willing to invest yourself time in three to five years,
I'm in. But it's probably going to take that because
I knew, you know, unless we had a hit record,
it's going to take time to build it. And we
really started, it really started, you know, uh, whatever you
want to call it, like, you know, gliding on its

(01:41:10):
own if you want to call it that. Probably year seven,
you know, where it was like okay, we're here, you know, three, yes, five, yes,
but seven was like yep, we're here, and you know,
from then, where can you go? So people said, well,
maybe it's never going to get out of here. So
eventually they played Madison Square Garden, you know, and we did.

(01:41:32):
We didn't do the full venue, but we did the
you know whatever. It is a twelve five setup, which
is what most people do right front and sides, and
we did, you know, phenomenal and it was like there
was terrent I remember there was torrential rain that day.
The subways were flooded, the tunnels were flooded. I thought
we were gonna have to cancel the show. In the end,
uh we you know, we played it and people came,

(01:41:55):
which was a rain stopped in the afternoon, luckily, but
it was torrential. It was you know, it was everywhere.
It was shutting things down. It was so bad. And
you know, we played it and there was you know,
more no shows than we would would have liked. But
still the place was full and it was phenomenal. And
so that was a step that was just to say,
you know, or said to us, rather, Okay, we're here now,

(01:42:15):
we can do whatever we want. We can go back
to what we're doing. But you know, earlier on we
started doing the amphitheaters, you know, in the summertime. We
did the theaters in the in the winter and or
fall and spring and in the winter actually because they
used to work. At one point they were working, you know,
anywhere from seventy to eighty, maybe ninety shows a year.
One year they hit one hundred and ten I think,

(01:42:37):
which was probably their biggest year. But that's a lot
of work, you know, playing on the road. And they
had kids too, so that that did that didn't help.
But you know, it built up and it got too
a place where now so your question, one of your
questions is like where does it go from here? I'm
not sure where it goes, but but it's in a
place where it's not an overdrive but kind of like

(01:42:58):
you know, there's there's a fan base. It's still growing. Okay,
it's not it's not really diminishing. I mean I watched
the shows. Uh you know whenever I'm out, you know
there and I see the people, and I don't see
people getting up and leaving, you know what I mean. Well,
when a lot of shows it's like, okay, I've seen
half of it. I'm going now when they do there
like you know, uh evening with and I have the

(01:43:21):
break in the middle. Sometimes you see that with other acts,
people start leaving during the break. Now they don't. They
go out, they buy beer, they buy whatever, they buy
you know, snacks, whatever, and they come back in buy merchandise. Uh,
they come back in, so uh, you know it's there.
So so then now the next thing is, you know,
which is one of the things you know that they did,
you know, beginning a few years ago, is they started

(01:43:43):
beefing up the production a little bit because because it
really has been and it still is but has been
uh since the beginning. You know, a musical act and
you've seen them, so I think you know what I mean.
But it's an act that you go there and you
look and you go out. These guys can play, all
of them, any one of them. It's it's almost like
any one of them without doing a pitch on the band.
It's almost like any one of them could have their

(01:44:04):
own band. It might not be a big band, but
any one of them can have their own band. And
in fact, most of the guys up there have their
own bands, you know, their side projects, right so, you know,
because they're really accomplished musicians. So the music and all
that's solid, you know, the sets, the shows, whatever. So
then they started doing the next thing, which is they
they've over the last three four years, they've started beefing

(01:44:28):
up the production a little bit, adding a little bit
more production value, entertainment value, you know, packaging. We did
this summer. They're doing you know, shows package with larger
acts where it's more of a co bill, trying to
you know, trying to present themselves to a larger audience
if possible. They've done festivals. You know, they don't live

(01:44:49):
on festivals, but they've done them. I don't know, this
is a personal thing we won't get into, but I
don't know the festivals they add that much to you
unless maybe you're.

Speaker 1 (01:44:55):
Well that was going to be my next question, but continue.

Speaker 2 (01:44:58):
Okay, well we'll hold it then for then a hold
that one. But yeah, so, yeah, it is growing, you know,
it's like it's like anything else, though it goes in spurts.
So there was a point where we were doing this little,
you know, this thing at the beginning, and then we
leaped like around year three or so, right, and then
were all of a sudden we started doing multiple theaters,

(01:45:18):
which was a plan. And the plan was to have
them because they were doing a lot of shows a year,
was to have them traveling less but doing the same
amount of business and being able to generate the income
they needed to keep the band going. So we started
doing multiples and then you know, then there was a
thing where kind of set there, and then we jumped
up and did more multiples in certain places, added some
more cities, and we started doing the outdoor thing, you know,

(01:45:40):
in the summertime, and they did that as a as
a scenario, and then and tried to play different markets,
so you know, we're getting to different people and you know,
so and then so then maybe it settled in for
a little bit and then now there's going to probably
be another spurt coming up, so it grows in spurts.
It not every act, every live act or artist goes like,

(01:46:03):
you know, straight up. It's not a straight up trajectory.
Usually if it is, then it starts coming down quicker,
I think. I mean, there's exceptions to every rule, but
then usually there's a down, you know, coming down over here.
Now it may go back up again at some point,
but it could also just crash back. So slower trajectory
is better. And you know, I think there's you know,

(01:46:23):
they can they can tour as long as they want
to or not I mean it don't have the tour,
but I mean they do to give the band together,
but they can tour as long as they want.

Speaker 1 (01:46:31):
Well, is the question here, especially today's major market, is
there a limited audience or is there a growth potential
from people who just haven't been exposed to it.

Speaker 2 (01:46:46):
There's there's a growth potential to people that haven't been
exposed to it. And what we find is what we
have found over time over the course of the career
so far, and initially the manager and I will when
at first started out, we had a we had an etho,
but the two of us had an ethos. We just
got to get into a town and play. People will

(01:47:08):
see us and they'll come back and bring a friend.
And it almost worked like that everywhere right first time
we played in New York? Who played one day at
the Beacon, which was a shot. Okay. When I tried
to get the Beacon Theater date together, I called, I
spoke to three different promoters, none of which wanted to
do it, and I finally John Cher said he would

(01:47:32):
raise his hand and I said, okay, Well, he said,
what do you want to do in New York? And
I said, I The first show in New York. By
the way, they hadn't played here yet as that band.
I said, I want to either be in Central Park
in the summer. I want to play the Beacon Theater headlining.
And he said, what's the deal, And I said, there
is no deal. This I shouldn't tell you, Bob, but
I'm going to tell you because it's you. I said,

(01:47:52):
there is no deal. Forget the deal. I want the Beacon.
Give me, give me a weekend night in the fall
and it's your show. And he got it Saturday night.
I don't know how he got it, but he got
it because it's hard to get the Beacon. Uh. And
I put the date together and we didn't have a guarantee.
We did a straight percentage of the door. Okay, we
sold it and we sold out. Well, we finish your story.

(01:48:13):
So we sold out. Everybody made money. And then the
next time, you know, we came around. He goes, Okay,
we're going to do it again next year and I said, no,
next year, we're doing two. And he was going, well,
you're crazy, blah blah, and I said no, we're doing too.
Because again, our theory was everyone's going to bring a friend,
so let's try it out, and we did, and we

(01:48:34):
did a weekend. Okay, honest truth, we didn't sell it
to the rafter. You know, we didn't sell every seat
in the house, but we fucking basically sold it out.
I mean it was. It was a great two nights.
And that's when I went upstairs to the back of
the house and I looked, and I thought, we're not
selling any seats upstairs. What can we do about that?
And I thought, let's try this. And I talked to

(01:48:54):
the manager and I said, let's make the back of
the house really inexpensive. Think the upstate had been to
the Beacon, so you know the you know the upstairs
balcony at the way back, I mean, you're up there.
They call the nosebleads, but actually they're good seats. But
you know they call the nosebleeds for the Beacon, you know,
for anywhere else, they'd be good seats, really good seats.
So we did a situation where we charged Okay, so

(01:49:15):
this is interesting, okay, I think for you. So I
made a deal with between the promoter and the venue.
I got them to agree to do an all in price. Okay,
this is ten years ago, all in thirty bucks next
time we played the venue, we sold all the seats

(01:49:39):
and I walked up there to see who is going
to be up there, and so some of the argument was,
you're just gonna you're gonna, you're gonna cannibalize, you know,
the other seats you're selling. I said, I don't think so.
I think they're fans. Even though we've only done it
in a couple of years, I think they're fans, or
maybe it was three years before we did that. I
think their fans are going to want to sit close.
That's what they want. They want to be comfortable and close.

(01:50:01):
That's who their fans are. I think up here we're
going to have people that want to see them but
don't want to pay seventy five dollars or sixty nine
or whatever the present. So we kept that for a
lot of years, and I used to go up there
and check at every show and you'd see you'd see
the face is not the particular people, but you could
tell those people haven't been here before, or those people

(01:50:23):
or there were young couples. I went to a young
couple and I said, hey, how you doing. You ever
seen the band before? And they go, oh, yeah, we
saw them once we love them. They said oh. I said,
oh great, and they said yeah, in fact, we came
tonight because we just got engaged. I said, oh, that's awesome, congratulations.
So they were there because obviously they wanted to pay
sixty bucks and not have to pay like one hundred

(01:50:43):
and twenty or whatever it was. And fine, it probably
really couldn't afford it, but they wanted to see the band.
The other thing that happens up there, or did happen
up there, is you get when we started doing the
multiple nights, right, you get people that want to come
back but don't want to pay one hundred and twenty five.
So they'll you know, one hundred twenty five one night
and they'll go sit upstairs, you know, for sixty for
two of them or whatever, you know, two people or
whatever or a group will go sit up there. So

(01:51:05):
we use that anyway. So from the two days, the
next time we played, I said, let's do three, and
John said, you're out of your mind. I said, no,
it'd be fine. We'll do Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So that's
what we did and we oh, no, sorry, we did.
We were actually going to do four. We're going to
do Friday Saturday, Friday Saturday, which he really freaked out about.

(01:51:27):
But we ended up doing three for other reasons because
we had there was another show that they played with
somebody else and it was kind of in conflict, but
they had the dates on hold already, so we only
did three instead of four, and we did great business,
and then the time after we did four, So it
was a matter of and so I think the theory
held true. Also, we had people that would come multiple nights,
but not as big as most people. Most people thought.

(01:51:48):
Most people thought, oh, yeah, they're you know, the fans
are just buying tickets again. Now I used to look
at the you know, the ticketing reports. We were doing
about thirteen percent repeats. It wasn't that high. You know,
it's probably more now, but you know, because now they'll
do six days or seven days or whatever. But you know,
it wasn't as high as people thought. People thought, you know,
we were doing fifty percent repeats or whatever, thirty percent.
We weren't doing it. It was thirteen. Maybe some people

(01:52:11):
did come back twice, or they came back again and
brought a different friend with them.

Speaker 1 (01:52:23):
Okay, we've touched on festivals in the old days. Yeah.
Up until very recently, you know, you played at twelve
or one, no one saw you. It was more to
put on your website. We played d lollaplues or whatever.
But now it's so hard to get noticed. Some acts
will play every festival and it seems like there is

(01:52:46):
some traction. What do you say to that.

Speaker 2 (01:52:51):
There is? I mean, there's some, but it's hard. Again,
if you're talking about the upper ten or twenty percent
of the acts, yes, maybe, yes, maybe, But when you
get down the line right when you're an up and
coming actor, when you're kind of one of those middle acts,
you know, when you're on at three o'clock in the
afternoon on the main stage, or even if you're on

(01:53:12):
like at five o'clock on that third or second or
third stage, like, who's seeing you? I mean, I've been
to some of these festivals. You go out at you know,
even three o'clock, who's there? Three thousand people? You know,
at eight o'clock at night is thirty thousand, At ten
o'clock is forty thousand. You know what I mean. It's
like if you get the right and I tell us
to ax all the time, but they but they want
it for the reason you opened up with Bob. They

(01:53:34):
want it on their resume. That's what they say. I
just want to say that I did it, I said, Okay,
I mean then I lose the argument because my argument
to them is why bother? You know, you have to
stick it in somewhere where it doesn't fit. You have
to try to surround it because you just don't want
to fly out and do it. You can't afford to,
and you're not making much money, and where are you playing.

(01:53:54):
You know you're planning to nobody. It's a shame. But yeah,
there can be some traction. And every once in a while,
well you know, an act comes out of the festival
season or something or two or three and everybody goes, oh,
that's how to do it. There's no magic bullet in
this business. There is no magic bullet. Now, if there
was an absolute brand new led Zeppelin today, only because

(01:54:16):
they're one of my favorite bands, or Jimmy Hendrix, I
think they did a couple of festival blow people away,
and yes it would happen, but if they did it
at one o'clock in the afternoon, nobody would frickin know.

Speaker 1 (01:54:27):
Okay, Another one of your long term clients is Joe Satriani.
Sometimes he works with other people. You know, it could
be too active, could be part of Sammy Hagar's being.
Is that just a lifelong career or is there any
upside in the touring of someone like Satriani.

Speaker 2 (01:54:47):
It's a lifelong career, really, I mean there's an upside
obviously he you know, he makes money or he wouldn't
do it. But it's a lifelong career. It's not like
you do it for you know, I don't think any
a lot of these extra five for five years and
you retire or ten years or whatever. But so I've
represented Joe for I don't even know how long, thirty
five years, long time, my probably longest client. He's on

(01:55:09):
the road. So what we've done, when I say, way
the former manager who passed away a few years ago unfortunately,
you know, terrible accident, what we would do with Joe
is we would just try to change it up because
again we had an artist or not again. But you know,
no record company, no radio stations after the mid nineties, right,
the AARs were dead early early to mid nineties, like

(01:55:31):
they just went away. And that's when his career started.
You know, when I career sorry, his business, not his career,
but his business started waning a bit, no pun intended.
And we had conversations on the phone about it, and
and I, you know, gave it some thought. We got
to do something, you know. And it's not about just
going to smaller venues, because with an artist, some of them,
some of them will accept that if they want to

(01:55:52):
just be you know, if they just want to work,
you know, I just want to go play my music,
I'm okay. But if if they have a you know,
if they have a like an artistic you know, feeling.
And we all have egos. All of us have egos,
big ones, little ones. It doesn't matter. We all have
to have an ego. I think we're not most of
us have egos. I shouldn't say, oh, maybe some people don't,
but most of us have some kind of an ego.

(01:56:14):
So as an artist, you want to be able to
present yourself. You don't want to just keep going smaller
and smaller venues. So I knew that that wasn't the answer,
you know. So we sat where I sat. We talked
on the phone, but I sat and I thought about
it and thought about it, and I thought, okay, we
gotta do something different. So I actually call the manager.

(01:56:34):
I said, I have an idea. So I'm a as
you may already know or not with the names i've
been thrown out, I'm a lifelong guitar freak, right, guitar
player freak like that's been my thing. So I've represented
a lot of guitar players over the years, bands with
you know, heavy guitar players, whatever, stand out guitar players
even now, even now, So I thought about it. I thought,

(01:56:55):
what would those fans, especially those guitar nerds, right the gearheads,
what do they want? I want to see? They want
to see they want to see guitar players. What's the
most exciting thing for me? When I, you know, was
in college and I went to a show and I
wanted to see a show. What was exciting. What was
exciting is when the guitar player from one band got
on stage with the guitar player from the other band.

(01:57:16):
They jammed for a while. So I called the manager
one day and I said, okay, I have an idea.
I said, what if we get three guitar players or
four guitar players and put them on stage with one
band and we do like the whole fucking shows almost
a jam like, you know, they play each of their
own songs or whatever. Then they jam some songs and
they do all this. And I said, basically, it's an

(01:57:38):
indoor festival. And he said, I don't know. Let me
think about it, all right, So he goes back, right,
and he calls me back. He goes. I spoke to Joe.
It's it's not a great idea, he said. There's some
problems with him. He said. One of them is, you know,
they have to learn his material. He has to learn theirs.
The other guys have to learn that, you know, blah blah.
He said. It's there's a logistical thing here. And again
we're not talking about you know, three chord blues, right

(01:58:00):
or whatever, three bard blues. We're talking about technique and
technical you know stuff. So I thought, okay, I understand,
you're right, he said, but how about this? He said,
what if we have three bands and the three bands
play each their own set, and then at the end
they jammed for half an hour. I said, that's a
great fucking idea. Let's do that. So that became G

(01:58:21):
three and the idea was to give him another platform,
to give him something, you know, he had spoken to
Joe and they had come up with that idea of
let's do the three bands with the three whatever and
then and then we had to come up with a name,
and he and Joe came up with G three, and
so G three was formed and that was basically three
bands led by guitar players on stage playing and then

(01:58:41):
they jammed at the end. And to this day, especially overseas,
everyone thinks it's a band. They always called me, I
want to book the G three band, you know whatever,
and I go, it's not a band, it's a concept.
So we did that for you know, many we did that. Alternately,
Joe would go on tour with an album and then
when he didn't have an album, we do G three
and we just, you know, we weren't like that. And

(01:59:02):
then what happens eventually is you run out of guitar players.
You know, unless you can get Brian May or Jeff
Beck or you know, Jimmy Page to be in it,
you start running out of guitar players that have teeth. Now,
there's some good guitar players out there, but what we
found is I'm probably going deeper than you want, Bob,
But let me know if I am no matter who
we put on. After about the first four or five,

(01:59:22):
the business got no better than Joe on his own
because it virtually was the same audience because none of
the other guitar players really had teeth. The best show
was the first one the business rather again because it
was probably the first one that was Joe Eric Johnson,
who I represented at the time, and Steve I was
the opening act, and Steve and Joe grew up together,
but they never played on stage together anywhere, so that

(01:59:45):
was like the first time they were kind of playing
together on stage, right. And then we did one again
the next time with Joe, Steve and Kenny Wayne Sheppard,
and we had Robert Fripp playing on the side of
the stage opening the show, but he didn't want to
be visit and he played what he called airport music,
but we advertised him on the bill, and he wouldn't

(02:00:05):
come out and jam with him because didn't want anybody
to see him for whatever reason. He's a lovely guy,
but he's not into the spotlight basically, you know, he's
not into being in the spotlight. Uh. And then the
next one that did the second best ever, I think
it was a third or fourth one was with Ingvey
Malmstein and that did really good business as well, because
again Ingvey had real teeth, right, And then we did

(02:00:27):
a bunch of other ones which were great, but then
it was you know, it didn't when you talk about growing,
it didn't really grow. So he kind of put it
and we did it overseas. We did in Australia, we
did in Europe, we did it in South America. So
we kind of put it on hiatus for a long
period of time. And actually the old manager and I,
you know, at one point thought, I don't know, let's
just or actually I recommended it to him, but he agreed.

(02:00:48):
I said, let's just let's just not do it right now.
It was a good brand. Let's not kill it, let's
not let it die, Let's let it be something. Let's
let people remember, you know. And so we let that go.
So then what happened last was it last year? Yeah?
I think it was last year the beginning of last year.
So last year was like the we call it the
twenty fifth anniversary, but I think it was actually like

(02:01:10):
the twenty seventh really of G three. We put the
original lineup back together in the original way, you know,
that we did it. Oh, no, we did it, but
I think Eric open this time. We put the lineup
back together and we just did a west coast run,
you know, north to south, because Joe wanted to do
a documentary on G three and he wanted to film
some live stuff and he wanted the guys back together.

(02:01:32):
He wanted to do it then and now, which they did.
They did that. So I put a run of dates together.
You know, that would pay for itself, make the guys
a few bucks, you know, you know that we're playing.
And so Joe could put a documentary together, which was
actually done by his son who went to film school.
He's the director. And it was great. The business was great.
The business was like the first time, it was amazing. Actually,

(02:01:53):
so it still has you know, it still has something,
it still has, you know, appeal. And then following that,
for the rest of the country. I had planned this
in advance. We did a Joe Satriiny band Steve Vaiband tour,
which we had never done before, with the two of
them playing, each with their own band, and then again
they jammed at the end and that did really, really well.

(02:02:15):
And then the manager talked to Joe and said, you
know what would be great because he and I had
talked and I said, you know, it would be great
if the two of them played together in a band.
That would be freaking amazing. And so he talked to
Joe and they talked to Joe and Steve talk together,
and so they put a band together. They actually went
in a studio and recorded an album, which they'd never

(02:02:37):
done before. Album comes out I think in September. They're
in Europe now doing the tour. Unfortunately, the album was
held up because of the LA fires, but they put
out a couple of tracks, so they're doing a tour
in Europe. The reviews were phenomenal, the UK dates were phenomenal,
and we're planning a tour here yet next year. So
I'm not trying to do a pitch for the tour,

(02:02:57):
but we're planning and doing that tour here next year.
Is called the setch V Band SVB be the first
time that you know in America that they play in
the same band and there's a guy that sings some songs,
so actually there'll be some vocals and it's just again
it's a new take. It's what you're asking about, what
do you do so it's a career, but you just
change it up, you know, you keep them excited, you

(02:03:20):
keep the audience excited. I mean, that's all part of it.
I just got an email from Steve I today going,
this is so exciting. I can't wait for the US dates.
I mean, that's what I do it for.

Speaker 1 (02:03:30):
Okay, let's go back to Niedo now that COVID is over. Yeah,
how active and what's the agenda of Needo?

Speaker 2 (02:03:39):
Sonito's very active. We just hired an executive director full
time starting this January. This at the end of last year,
I was elected president for this year, so I'm sort
of in the driver's seat, I guess if you want
to call it that. But we have a board of
directors which are probably probably half of the originals or
a little less than half the original guy as people.

(02:04:01):
And then we have some you know, new members that
we've had new members coming in over the years. Some
some people step down off the board, but we you know,
we're fighting to fight on the tickets that we just
talked about, and you know, the ticketing and the fees
and whatever. We had a joint board meeting in Milwaukee
with NEVA to see what it is they would like

(02:04:23):
to see what they their problems, what they would hope
to have happened. We gave them some of the things
that we think we would like to see for us,
for our clients. Uh So it was a good two
hour discussion that we had. Aside from you know, individually talking,
that was like a sit down joint board meeting. We
had a before that they're turning over their president. They

(02:04:48):
have a new president coming in July one. So we
met with you know, two presidents and the executive director.
Myself and two of the officers are our executive director
had a baby, had a baby two and a half
weeks ago, so he couldn't make the trip. He didn't
have a baby. He and his wife had a baby.
They couldn't make the trip. So he couldn't make the trip.
He didn't want to leave home for three or four days.

(02:05:08):
Uh So we we filled in for him on that.
In that meeting, we're you know, we are talking to
the p ros, the performing rights organizations about I don't
want to get into a long conversation because that could
last another hour, but you know, basically performing rights for
people I don't realize, and the fans and audience aren't
really going to care about this, but managers and artists

(02:05:29):
care about it most of all. You know, the p
r os, four of them right now. They collect you know,
a fee on every show in most of every venue.
Right some venues maybe they don't have a deal with yet,
but mostly most of the venues, and that all goes
into a pool. And one of the managers are speaking
this weekend and this week sorry I keep saying this weekend,

(02:05:50):
this week and saying that they had an artist that
agreed to So what happens is you pay the four
performing rights organizations okay, no matter what you sing or play,
but you may only be licensed or have a deal
with one of them. Okay, most people have with one
or two. And if you're doing a lot of cover
songs or other people's material, it could be that they're

(02:06:13):
all four, right, But somebody that does their own material,
if they have a deal with BMI, it's only BMI,
not ASCA, for instance, or CSAK or GMR. So you're
paying into a pool. And this one act said, Okay,
I'll make a list of all the songs I'm playing
and I'll submit it so that I can get paid
on what to perform. So he did his whole tour

(02:06:34):
and did that and on the money that was drawn
on one of the shows. And I'm just this is
third party, so I don't know this for a fact.
One of the shows that he joined, I'm not sure
what was paid in. It could be as much as
three to six It could be like eight hundred bucks,
seven hundred and fifty bucks. Let's say in a theater
venue or something, you pay in it's actually a fixed

(02:06:55):
fee versus a percentage of the sales most of the time. Okay,
so let's say seven one hundred to one thousand he
paid in, he got twenty eight bucks. So where the
rest of the money go. So that's what we're looking into.
Now take that to a stadium level, and could you imagine.
I had a conversation with an attorney for one of
the major for a number of major stadium acts, and

(02:07:17):
I said, hey, if you ever looked at the pros?
And he goes, what are you talking about? I said,
do you ever see a settlement sheet? He said no.
I said, let me send you a copy. I got
on the phone with him a couple of days later.
I said, have a look at this. I said, look
at how much it's being paid out. How much you
get how much do you realize you realize how much
money that is on a tour if you do in
all stadiums, I'm sure you're not getting that back. And
he was like, holy shit, that's a lot of money.

(02:07:37):
So we're trying to deal with that. Where are we
going to get We don't know. We're advocating, you know,
we're advocating for tickets. We did something again the normal
Joe's not going to care about. We negotiated a you know,
a terms and conditions attachment for contracts with Live Nation
individually and AEG individually, and we're working with Neva to

(02:07:59):
get something that they could recommend to their venues so
that instead of them getting every from every agency for
every act, a different set of terms and conditions. That's
the add ons to the contract, like you know, no photography,
you know, if it rains, this happens, you know, all
the extra crap, you've got to have two million dollars
in insurance, you know all that stuff. We're trying to
pre negotiate all that so you can just do your

(02:08:20):
basic contract, attach it which has already approved, send it,
no argument. We all agreed it already, so we're trying
to do that just to make the whole process of
the contracting a lot easier and less tense and argumentative.
So there's that that doesn't seem like a lot, but
it is for a day to day scenario. We're you know,
we negotiated an insurance policy for the younger acts to

(02:08:44):
have a you know that need bottom line insurance for
touring that can't afford a lot of insurance. So we
negotiated with an organization needle members get a discount, and
there's like a low level for the band starting out
to make sure their equipment's covered. You know, they've got
you know, you know, liability like that kind of stuff.
So so we've negotiated that. At one point, we we know,

(02:09:07):
we negotiate, sorry, we negotiated with Peter when Peter was
still at a hub. We negotiated a festival and outdoor
show weather contract or or deal for neat lower level
Needo acts, right, they can't afford you know, not what
do you call it weather insurance? Right, cancelation insurance. So

(02:09:27):
so we you know, we did that. So some of
the stuff we're doing is kind of boring and mundane
to everybody else, but it's you know, it's for our members.
You know, there's there's other things, uh, that we've been
working on. You know, the ticketing things is a really
big one because we've been involved in Maryland, we were
involved in Maine, we were involved in New York State,
We're involved in California. You know, we're involved in in

(02:09:49):
a lot of different states because really at state by
state over here, and and then there's things that that
come up that you know, that that members say they
need that we you know that we get involved with.
So that's what we're here for. We do we run
we're starting to run weekly, sorry not weekly, monthly webinars
indoor town halls. So we used to do them once

(02:10:09):
in a while. We do zooms for our members, so
we've been this year we decided to get you know,
serious about it, so we're doing one. So we did
one on marketing and PR where we brought marketing people
in and PR people you know, from a couple of firms,
from a couple of promoters, independent marketers to do with
session for members that wanted to to discuss marketing and
public relations. We did one on visas Carnes and something else.

(02:10:35):
There was like three topics on it. Boring for most people,
but for people, especially managers that are touring, they need
to know about that stuff. They need to know what
their options are, what their issues, what the issues are.
You know, country by country you can change, especially now
that you know the UK is not in the EU anymore.
It was easy to get from you know, the UK
into Europe and tour, but now that they're not part

(02:10:55):
of the EU, there's a whole thing of the trucking
go in and out of the UK back to Europe.
Things that you know, most people generally don't know about.
We did what we're going to We did one on
mental health on the road the other day, which was
a really good one. We had a lot of people
attend that one, and that's important because that's happening. Issues
are happening more and more, you know, when you're out

(02:11:16):
on the road, especially for these crew people right there.
So an artist goes on the road for you know what,
sixty or eighty days, maybe ninety days. Maybe maybe it's
one hundred and twenty, you know, but not that many shows,
but maybe it's over a period. Some of these crew
guys are working all year long and they don't think
about it. The burnout rates really high mentally I'm talking

(02:11:37):
about physically also, so you know, there are a lot
of issues. So we're just trying to we're trying to
help with that, so you know, those are the kinds
of things that we do.

Speaker 1 (02:11:46):
Okay, Finally, why should someone hire you as an agent
as opposed to anybody else? And implicit in that question
is to what degree should acts hire and independent age
as opposed to one of these corporate own full sort
of agencies.

Speaker 2 (02:12:07):
I'll just say this to the on the immediately to
get it out of the way before I actually say
why they should hire me personally, it really depends on
what an acts looking for. If they want to be
a TV film star, I'm not the place to come, Okay.
I doubt whether the regular Joe act is going to
be a film or TV store. Anyway, it's a great pitch.
I've had a couple of acts over the years that

(02:12:28):
left me because they thought they were going to get
a film score or they were going to be in
a movie or a TV thing. And I'm still waiting
to see and hear all of the above. Okay, So
that's number one. It depends on what you want. If
you want somebody that's going to help you and give
good advice, if you want somebody that's gonna really care,
and if you're gonna want somebody and I hate to
say this because my daughters think I'm I'm crazy and

(02:12:50):
I should get out of business already, is if you
want somebody that's gonna lose sleep over your fricking tour
and literally wake up at five o'clock in the morning
with an idea that they think is going to help
you do something different that will help your career, or
an idea. I've actually texted you know, promoters at six
o'clock in the morning when I came up with something

(02:13:10):
to save a date that I thought was going to
go down. And you want some good advice on like
building and maintaining your career, I'm the guy, but I'm again,
I'm not for everybody. I say what I mean Sometimes
I shouldn't, but I do. I'm basically honest as far

(02:13:32):
as and I don't mean in a financial way. I'm
talking about in a conversational way. I may say things
that will end up costing me the relation, the representation,
but I'm going to say what I mean, because if
somebody is dreaming, I'm going to tell them that you're dreaming.
I hope you achieve it, but I don't think you will.
I think you got to. You know. Sometimes it's like
I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna get here. Yeah,
there's a lot of steps to get there. You're not

(02:13:53):
just getting there. You got to do all this first.
And you know, I like to take care of details.
I'm a detail oriented guy for everyone else, not for myself.

Speaker 1 (02:14:04):
Okay, Wayne, a lot of information here. I'm glad we
covered what Nita was doing, a lot of important stuff.
I want to thank you for taking this time to
talk with my audience.

Speaker 2 (02:14:15):
You're welcome, Bob anytime. I appreciate it. Thank you for
the time.

Speaker 1 (02:14:18):
Okay, we still didn't cover David Bowie in all the
Old Days at another time.

Speaker 2 (02:14:23):
Well, we should come back to that because I have
some good stories. If you want to do a story, okay.

Speaker 1 (02:14:26):
I'm sure. Until next time. This is Bob left six