A Warning On the Future of Music: with Author Ted Gioia | Podcast #1

Valley right I was right in the heart of it I dealt with all these people I mean I I people I went to business school with are now billionaires I know how those people think they're just eating Hollywood's lunch because they're they're shooting they're smart and they're controlling the technology decisions I decided to reach out to a person that I did not know but I'm a huge fan of his writing and that's Author Ted Joya you may remember me referencing one of his articles called is old music killing new music here's a little background on

Ted Ted Joy was born into a sicilian Mexican household in Hawthorne California a working-class area in South Central Los Angeles he went on to receive a degree in philosophy politics and economics at Oxford University in England and then returned to Stanford to complete an MBA he's published 11 non-fiction books and Written articles published in the New York Times Wall Street Journal the guardian and Smithsonian Magazine to name just a few perhaps best known for his books a history of jazz and how to listen to Jazz in recent articles he's accurately predicted the demise of the

Netflix subscription and failure of Spotify to turn a profit it's this combination of his fascination with music and the evolution of culture that I find Engaging and it's why our topics keep seeming to overlap here's my interview with Ted welcome Ted thank you for having me here I've been reading a lot of your latest articles I I subscribe to your sub stack and all of you should subscribe to Ted's sub stack actually can you talk about sub stack what it is so people know sub stack is an alternative publishing platform and it's interesting because in

many ways this is what I would like to see From musicians I wish and I tell the people at sub stack you know you should do something for musicians because the way it works is I have complete control for my platform so anything I put up on that I have complete copyright on and own all the intellectual property okay I can charge for subscriptions or I can give them away for free it's up to me if I charge I get to keep 90 percent wow of the revenue subject takes 10 percent okay so this is

very Favorable for creators and literally everything is in my control I get to decide when to publish what to publish I get to decide if I want to have an article behind a paywall or not and I've told the folks at sub stack you should really do this for musicians as well because they are not getting 90 on the dollar let me tell you and this whole idea of being able to reach directly your audience is wonderful if I leave sub stack I can bring my email list with Me I mean everything in terms of

the decisions they've made have been procreator when you do an article for the New York Times for example like the one I reference why how old music is killing new music The New York Times Did they publish every part of it or do they decide oh well we have editorial control over how long it is for example how do you how does that work so in this instance sub stack allows me to license out articles okay So people approached me at times and they say a Ted we like this article can we license it from

you so once again this is completely my decision whether I want to do it or not in some instances they want to make edits in the case of that article they want to make a number of edits more or less to fit with their house style yeah yeah and I and I I allowed every one of their edits although later there was one I should have not not allowed because they turned A very clear statement into something that was misleading I'm not going to go down that path but in fact this is the difference between

sub stack and working for periodical right with substance I'm allowed to have a more conversational voice I mean it's not much different what you do you were able to uh create a almost a one-to-one relationship with your audience and that's one of the things I tried to do with sub stack but as soon as you start working for one of These large periodicals uh they wanted a little less informal or more structured and so that's that that's the world we live in now is the the media is moving to this more personalized approach but in

many ways the mainstream media hasn't caught up with that so Ted and I had dinner last night and and I like to do that with people that I interview I like to know them uh at least a little bit and you Mentioned about when articles started getting shorter when when your editors would ask you uh could this be a this many paragraphs talk can you talk about that for a minute because I thought that was so funny and insightful well I have a lot of frustrations with uh mainstream media and I think a lot of

musicians in your audience will relate because we're all facing the same pressure and the pressure is to make things more like click bait to dumb down to make things Shorter and I was telling you about how I started out as a writer this is back just when I got out of college and I began writing for some of the leading newspapers and my entry point was writing book reviews that's what I saw I was writing book reviews and I remember at the very beginning they would say Ted could you write 800 to a thousand words

on this book and I said yeah and I and I send it to them they'd be fine it would be well received but a few years later It was Ted could you write 600 words okay 600 words and then it was could you do 400 words and really make sure no paragraph has more than three sentences and you know we really like those paragraphs that just have one sentence that's like our ideal paragraph if there's just one sentence and I remember I got to the point I was reviewing a novel by Haruki murakami called 1q84

which is this thousand page novel and I'm going to review this in 400 words and at that point I'm not going to do this anymore I am not going to do this anymore right and so since that I have turned down every freelance writing opportunity that's been presented to me for years now and yesterday one of the leading editors in New York Ted will you do this I just no I and God blessed them I want these newspapers and periodicals to flourish but I fear there's a race to The bottom where they're making things shorter

and Dumber and I don't want to you know play a part in that so the view thing about sub stack if you see my writings there I just published an article the other day about Duke Ellington and George Gershwin yeah is there a secret rivalry between Ellington and Gershwin something no one's ever written about but as soon as you look into the story it's fascinating that there was this behind-the-scenes Grudge that was going on and I wrote 3 000 words and no one could stop me right and I did this article on the 100th anniversary

of Jack Carroll expert yeah where I talked about his whole career and his writings and a lot of personal uh insights that was 8 000 words I think right you know there's not a newspaper in this country that would allow me to to write it and I don't have a thousand words if I mentioned that the the editor would Scream and hang up on me so and and that's we need more freedom like that in in the culture because creative people don't want to work in a box right you know they want to have some

freedom to take chances and if you're working in an environment where they're saying make it shorter quicker Dumber faster that's bad for all of us I mean so I experience as a writer but I see this I think everywhere in our culture right now well it's definitely in the music Business three-minute songs our three-minute songs bad you had a uh YouTube video where you talked about this talk about that for a minute talk about the kind of this evolution of three-minute songs or historically about short songs versus long songs well I sometimes complain about the

three-minute song but but check this out right now the music industry thinks their savior will be Tick-Tock right I mean right they're absolutely convinced That all the problems they have are going to be solved by Tick Tock but I saw this study and it's unbelievable that someone analyzed the most successful Tick Tock videos and they said the ideal music for a successful Tick Tock video is 16 seconds in duration I really can't believe that the future of music you know the next breakthrough is going to be 16 second songs I mean this is like me

getting down to those 400 word articles can you do one sentenced you know right but I this is the interesting thing as as you as you know I've done a lot of research into music history into things no one else has researched I mean really into the Dark Inner recesses of what was happening and not just a hundred years ago but a thousand years ago thousands of years ago and one of the things I learned researching a book of mine called Healing songs was about music's ability to put us into a trance to actually alter

our mind States so if you listen to a rhythm what Andrew near discovered back in the early 1960s is eventually your brain waves match the Rhythm of the music but here's the catch it doesn't happen in 16 seconds or even three minutes it's more like 10 minutes right you start falling into a trance Interestingly I found Dr Barry Bittman did research on drummers and drum circles and found that the drumming actually improved their immune system it actually changed their body chemistry sure but there was a catch you had to do the drumming for at least

10 minutes wow now at that time I was studying these traditional shamanistic rituals around the world in which the I mean these are found everywhere in Africa in Asia Native America Australia and it's uncanny how similar the rituals are in these places we have a shaman he's a Healer right and a Visionary but he's also a musician and often in many cases he but he originally it was probably she because even the male shamans in many instances dressed up as women so it there's there's sort of the and if you go back long enough if

you go back into these ancient paintings these Paintings from 2500 years ago the frame drums are always played by women in these so there's this interesting you play the drums and then the shaman gets into a trance and in the trance has a vision often of how you're going to heal somebody or you know what's going to happen in the future but once again I saw again and again in the literature these shamanistic rituals the shaman Does not fall into a trance until about 10 minutes okay and I began thinking about this is this relevant

to our commercial music culture and I started thinking you know The Beatles had that amazing hit Hey Jude which was their longest trap yeah and I think it was because they finally got a song long enough for people to fall into the trance state but I started asking myself do people really want a three-minute song and then I started Realizing something first thing I realized is when bands play a song in concert they almost always play it longer than they did on the record it's almost as if instinctively they realize that the audience needs more

than three minutes to hatch into the song and then I remembered something I did and it's not only me I think everybody did this if there was a song you liked when you're growing up you put on the Record and as soon as it was done what would you do you brought the needle back at the very beginning and you listen to it again I do that I listen to a song 30 times in a row and it's because you love the song It's a short song but that three minutes is not enough for you

right to really to get in that altered mind state right so that's why I I did this video and I and I've written about this is do we really want three-minute songs and people misinterpret it they so They're a lot of great three-minute song of course I I don't get me wrong I love those songs I grew up on those songs I cherished them but I do think our musical culture is missing something because to get the true altered mind benefit of music and music does alter our minds absolutely absolutely for some people that don't

use these various illegal substances for some people this is the only true altered mind State they will have in Their lifetime comes from the music and so I fear we are selling ourselves short by not giving more freedom for the longer song and then I particularly look at Tick Tock yes and I I fundamentally don't believe 16 second music is the future of anything and the industry is kidding themselves uh once again because they industry music industry has a long history of kidding themselves and so I would like to see the exact opposite of tick

tock I'd like to see more of a push towards longer songs that really benefit from this trance state that you can get into or after around 10 minutes the last time I did a Spotify countdown which I do from time to time I I did a video on the top 10 songs on the pop charts probably two weeks ago and I noted that there were only three songs that were over three minutes on the charts now we're getting back into early Beatles territory where On their first few records there was never a song over three

minutes it wasn't until rubber solar so that you started getting longer and longer songs now we're we've come back to these incredibly short songs how much of this do you think is not just the effect of tick tock and the record labels using Tick Tock to promote the music for them and people's attention span from consuming social media and being on screens all The time and things like Tick Tock YouTube shorts Instagram What what is the what are the contributing factors to these things well there are a couple points I'd like to make there are

a number of factors pushing for shorter songs first of all you make more money on the streaming platforms if you have more tracks on your album right so if you had an hour-long album with 60 songs on it Right you know what you're gonna we're gonna make a bundle of money yeah and so first of all people are incentivized to create very short songs and I think it's always unfortunate when the creative process is unduly influenced by making a buck and don't get me wrong I've got I have I'm not opposed to making a buck

you know we all have to pay our bills but at a certain point the financial incentives can be out of whack with moving the music Forward so first of all there is a financial incentive for the shorter songs right and then there's also a widespread belief in the music industry and in many entertainment and media Industries that people just don't have the attention span for anything really serious or anything really long I remember a story and I'm not going to give the name but I had my old roommate Was learning saxophone and he was going

to all these sax conscious and there was a famous rock sax player that he was going to see and I'm not going to mention the name and my friend had been listening to all this Jazz and he went to see the rock Sox player and he was very disappointed because he thought it was just a bunch of old blues cliches strung together and afterwards he went backstage and he asked this guy he said you know I want to know if you didn't have to worry about money and you could play any kind of music you

wanted would you still play the same kind of stuff you played tonight and the sax player he stopped and he thought he said Noah I wouldn't do that what would you do if you didn't have to worry about money these the sax player stops you know I play like Coltrane and this was a Funny part he stopped he said but people don't want that that's intelligent and I think that's the kind of thinking that that's not just this this individual this permeates the music business that people don't have the attention span and they have to

push things shorter and Dumber now the big question is is that true okay is it in fact is that true true that people do not have the ability To pay attention to something that that's that's longer and and more intelligent like Coltrane yeah and I don't believe it and I know fundamentally in my own experience I made a decision at a certain point in the past that I was going to assume that my audience was smart I was going to assume that my audience was discerning and I was going to assume that my Audience had

very little tolerance for okay I was just going to make that assumption okay and they have not disappointed me they have lived up to that and I have found particularly on substance I started occasionally doing these sort of short Punchy entertaining articles to mix up my super long essays but what I found is actually I get more clicks on the long ones right and and I do believe we underestimate the audience I believe we underestimate the reading audience I believe we underestimate the music Audience so although there is this perception that music fans want a

16 second song I don't believe it I believe people want to have their mind expanded I believe they want to experience new things I believe they want to have broader Horizons I believe they want to have musical experiences that aren't just packages and formulaic and if we're Letting them down by not giving them the opportunity to have that so you're right the industry thinks the attention span is short but I I wish more people would do what I'm doing is I'm going to assume the best out of my audience and they will they won't disappoint

us well I like to assume the best out of my audience I don't try and make videos that I know are going to do well because I can never predict that that that's an Impossibility so I'd make videos on what I'm interested in I made a video a couple months ago on a John Dowling song The Earl of Essex galliard now it was written in 1597 no nobody knew it has a million and a half views those 90s musics are old enough but you're doing 1590s Rick so no one was looking for a John Dowling

video but I thought this is something I'm interested in and come to find out that people are interested that follow my channel in what I'm interested In I just kind of assumed that so I make videos on things on anything and I never you know some video some of my videos like my Pat Metheny interviews an hour and 45 minutes and I have videos that are six minutes long very few of those but I have no video length that I make I make the video as long as it needs to be right like you're like

you're writing well let me Riff on that for just a second and and I warned you I might go Off on tangent so but okay you're looking at a John dowan song in 1597 and then there's a concern is what an audience today have any interest in this I am planning this long ass it could even be a book and it's the title right now is the year 1600 in music okay because something strange happened in music in the year 1600 or around about then and uh I would even go so far as to say

that musicians around that time helped To invent the concept of psychology okay now we assume that psychology always existed but in fact it was if you go back far enough there really was almost no speculation on what's going on in someone's head the stories were about what they did but what was actually people thinking and feeling back then and around 1600 you have Shakespeare shows up and he has these extraordinary plays that are all about what's happening in People's heads you know Hamlet's going through to be or not to be that if you actually study

what those words mean it's like this inner turmoil and there was nothing in literature before that that really dug into it but around that same time in music the Sonata is invented which is to demonstrate not the music but the individual's music a basso continual comes out of Music which is to support an individual voice Opera is invented which is about these passionate stories about people's inner lives you have all these madrigals which are songs about the inner torment I have because my love life is is falling apart you have the beginnings of what we

call concertos now which is not an orchestral piece it's an individual battling the orchestra right all around the year 1600 musicians discovered how to tap into their souls Now you're looking at John dowland and this is a classic example of that now let's get back to our original point if I wrote this thing on the year 1600 in music I guarantee you there's not an editor out there in New York that would want me to write about the year 1600 in music but I am absolutely convinced that this is a gripping story it's a riveting

story and it speaks to the whole purpose of Music in our inner lives and these stories not only do they deserve to be Told but I think people want to hear these stories and I believe that they resonate so I I mean at first brush you do a video on a song from 1597 every expert would tell you all right that's a big mistake I know no one no no one's going to want to hear about but fundamentally you're you you understand this is right because you responded to that music yeah and the music has

that emotional power for some of the reasons that I was outlining but that doesn't Get old after even after 400 years no it does not one of the articles that you wrote recently is about fake artists on Spotify can you talk about this well it's hard to figure out what's going on because no one will give you a straight story but probably the best way of explaining it is that I went to the Jazz playlist on Spotify because my I love all kinds of music but my background is jazz I mean I started Out as

a jazz musician and so if you do a search on Spotify on Jazz it immediately brings you to this playlist right and so I click on it and I look at it now I'm a pretty knowledgeable Jazz historian and Jazz writer of the first 15 tracks on this I had only heard of two of the artists what what's going on here why are there all these artists I've never heard of right and and I started doing Google searches On them and I found what I had heard from other people that had done this research they're

saying all these artists that no one's heard of they're all living in Sweden now by pure coincidence spotify's headquarters right in Sweden now draw from that what you will and then there was an Insider who who sent Anonymous email to a web blog okay now you can't prove any of this and I'm always trying to be very Careful about what I say right in particularly I don't want to I don't this is it's all speculational but this Insider said well let me tell you what's going on here these people have agreed to do music for

just a flat fee and the library all the arrivals yeah give up all their royalties or accept a very small royalty yep in in terms of placement so I started digging into this so I found That there was uh this one track on the Spotify playlist and and I looked at had four million plays and I clicked on the album it's from and the albums from has two tracks the other track had almost no plays and this one track had 4 million and then I found this was you know amazing to me that the placement

on this Jazz playlist at Spotify could get you more clicks than most of the tracks on the album of the Year that just won the Grammy yeah something is strange in the in the state of Denmark excuse me in the state of Sweden uh when you have a situation where artists no one has heard of are getting all the clicks and and music that people would enjoy more is being left off the playlist so I speculate that the playlists are being determined by what's most profitable for the streaming platform This is not good for the

musical culture let me give you an analogy okay in the old days I used to shop at Barnes and Noble and other bookstores when you walk into Barnes and Noble at the front of the store there's a table that has hey these are the books you should really buy right that's the first thing you see yeah I long assumed that these were the best new books but then someone told me a tad come on they're Paying for placement right so these aren't the best books that came out that month that's the books that the publisher

is gave them some money okay well this makes sense now I understand the new owner of Barnes and Noble got rid of that and he said we're going to now go to within a different system where the people running the store that really love books get to take books that people Might actually enjoy right and put them on the table I heard the results now are really great they're actually having Book Sales go up rather than down each year and it's not a small matter it's not a small matter do you promote the music or

the books or whatever that people were going to enjoy or do you pitch something that makes a buck for you and I worry about our musical culture If in fact the institutions that control everything because really the most important people in music now are the CEO of Apple the CEO of Google the CEO of Spotify that's right the hedge funds that are buying up all the publishing lights these are the most powerful people in music none of them are from a music background like you and me right these are people from a tech background for

the most part I worry about a situation in which people That I fear do not genuinely love music they don't genuinely care and know about music and now they're making decisions on what everyone's going to hear based on profit maximization I think that not only explains the fake artist situation but may also explain why there's declining loyalty people don't love music as much as they used to I know that seems like an extraordinary generalization about that About gen's ears don't you know I I this is just my own you know from talking to to kids

I talk to kids all the time I have young kids I talk to their friends and they're just not engaged in music and and the Loyalty part of it I think and and sting said this too that the fact that you can just turn on a water faucet you get access to anything on through streaming whereas before you used to buy albums and cherish them and Own them and absolutely and there's something to that right and I don't and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna be the old man yelling at the clouds or get off

my lawn I don't blame these people because I think we have not served them well and we have not given them a music culture that can engage them to the extent that they're capable of being engaging this goes back to my fundamental belief People want to have mind expanding experiences and they want these transformative experiences from music and I believe that the power Brokers in the music business are letting them down they're preventing it they're preventing by the things that they're that they're pushing essentially so I'm not blaming I'm not blaming the youngins no I

think that many ways I mean to me they're not engaged because the things that they're hearing are not Engaging absolutely our generation is as much to blame if not more so than this or maybe the people a little younger than us I don't know but still it's the decision makers that are creating the musical culture uh and and if I were 17 now and I turned on the radio and I will radio that's in Antiquated but if you or a playlist of the of the top hits yeah I would probably lose interest in about five

minutes now Ted people will say when I Do a top 10 Spotify countdown on the the most popular songs well those aren't the most popular songs that's just what Spotify says it's and I say wait no this is they're true well and you you wrote an article about this recently about the about Groundhog Day this this relates to this about the same songs keep reappearing I stopped making these top 10 pop Spotify countdowns because they're the same Songs month after month after month why is this it's fascinating because it used to be songs would go

into rotation on a radio station uh so these are the top 40 hits and every week the list would change a little bit yeah but over time you started seeing radio stations and playlist characters and everybody in the industry becoming more risk-averse right and if there was a song that was popular well I'm not Gonna take it off though I'm not gonna be the one to take it off the list right and all of a sudden you had this situation where songs would get into rotation and would never leave right which made it very difficult

for the next song yeah um and and it's all because of this risk-averse cautious mentality on the industry but then I saw this research that resulted in the article you mentioned the groundhog day and that Wasn't actually my coinage it was the the people that came out with the studies the music Industries like Groundhog Day it's always the same and they every year they do a study yeah and this they try to determine what are the most popular songs because they're distrustful of the list because the lists don't measure sales anymore back in the days

when the the best-selling list mentioned actual sales yeah it was meaningful someone had actually reached Into their wallet and bought this music yeah nowadays it's all this formula based on clicks and Views and what streams and you know who knows what goes into those those figures but this research group wanted to find an alternative way of determining popular songs so what they do is they look at all the songs that are on the stream playlist on radio rotation they come up with like a list of a thousand songs And then they take consumers of a

wide range of Ages backgrounds geographies and they play the song and they ask the individuals to rate the song so they can figure of all the songs that are out there in rotation what are the most popular and what they find is they've done this three years in a row and it's always the same songs right on the top and this year the top 10 songs nine of them were same in the top ten the previous year Yeah and they say we're now groundhog day is that you listen to the most popular songs and they

just don't change now that's a more extreme example and and uh if you look at radios maybe they have a slightly faster change in rotation but the bottom line is that the musical culture has stopped evolving or it's not evolving rapidly but once again I don't blame the musicians I know for a fact And let me just say this I think I listen to more new music than any other music critic out there I can't prove it but so far this year I have listened to almost 800 new albums in their entirety okay I listen

to all genres we're only in May I know I have listened to almost 800 new albums this year yeah I devote several hours every day to this okay I listen to every genre obviously I'm a jazz person so I listen To Jazz I listen to classical I listen to rock pop country soundtrack reggae and I try to find obscurest of what's happening in Africa what's happening in Indonesia what's happening in Japan I'm really determined to have the pulse of the music culture today and what I find there's great music out there but it's never coming

from a major label it's all Indian self-produced yeah and so when I look at the Groundhog Day phenomenon I don't blame the musicians there are Plenty of musicians out there that could could rock rock our boats and and blow our minds they're not given a chance and we're letting them down but then obviously we the flip side of that is we let down the audience because if they were exposed to this music they would be a lot more excited about what they're hearing so the it's once again and I know people think I'm I'm so

Ted why do you hate streaming I don't hate streaming I love streaming it's the Business model and the decision makers that are letting us down so that's that's a fundamental problem there behind all these things we're talking about now you predicted their business model would tank you tweeted about it back in 2018 but I believe well you know I I should go into Financial advice because I did it's funny I did this article yeah Netflix as well I did this article in like February saying why Netflix would falter and since then Netflix's share prices dropped

70 someone's attended to you did you shortly well no but you know it just was obvious to me that the Netflix model doesn't work and this goes back to the fact that although I'm a musician you know I got a MBA from Stanford degree from economics and Oxford and I worked early in my life in in business strategy financial analysis and works as a futurist basically people would hire me to predict the future okay in business Settings and I never thought I would use those and then I left that behind it'd be going to music

yeah and thought well I'm never going to use those skills to go in fact I'm using those skills all the time so anyway I did that prediction about Netflix and then Spotify had this this wait wait let's stay on Netflix for a second why not why is Netflix the amount of titles that were available on Netflix or there Were six thousand now there's four thousand there's less the choice is getting us and less and this runs against what people will tell you people say well Ted and the great thing about the internet is everything is

available not really and if you look at Netflix they have almost no movies available that are more than 10 years old right in fact if you want to see a black and white film and you know I don't even know if they hit there maybe like three The whole history of Cinema disappears from Netflix yeah and so there's a narrowing a choice which I think is wrong but the the real thing I pointed out that no one has done is and I had done this early on in my life once again in business analysis I

did this analysis of what I call the closed system versus the open system okay no no bear with me for a minute here all right in that uh I'll give you an example In the early 1960s there was a credit card it was the Visa but it wasn't called Visa back then okay it's called Bank America card I remember that you could only get it if you were a Bank America customer and Bank of America made a fortune because they had the credit card and people were signing up but they had a closed system you

could not get the card unless you were A Bank of America customer absolutely closed system and they thought this is the way to go why should we share because we got it we're going to dominate but what happened is 300 other Banks got together and introduced MasterCard okay so now it's wait a second we had an advantage with our closed system this open system is is kicking our butt so they had to turn Bank of America into visa and make it available for everybody So this is example number one is that there was a closed

system that locked out everybody and all the competitors got together and beat up on them and forced it to open right and then I gave a dozen other examples when Bank ATMs the same thing Bank of America you can only use our ATM if you're a Bank of America customer but they were forced to open up because the star system was open In computers Mac would not license its operating system but Bill Gates would became the richest man in the world at Microsoft because the open system is what people want right it's true of video

games the Sony betamax lost out to VHS because Sony would not license and they wanted a closed system so anyway I go through this history every time in history when you have a closed system where we're going to control it all Ourselves and they're competing against open systems the open systems win so Netflix is the closed system so we're going to control our own content we're gonna make our own movies our own TV shows you only get them well and they don't provide any data as to what how well things are doing you don't know

anything about Netflix it's all black box that's right and so I I said the there are a bunch of Problems in Netflix but the fundamental one is they're going to take on all of Hollywood and instead of partnering with Studios and they're they're going to do it all themselves and force everybody to go to Netflix just to get Netflix content so this is not going to work this is not going to work the the they should open up their system this is the funny thing is I wrote this article afterwards explaining this And then a

few days later CNN plus shut down right and and the CEO is explaining well people want more of an open system he must have read my article he actually it was funny he was trying to explain why they were shutting down CNN plus and it was almost like he was taking the very words from uh from my article but fundamentally I do believe people want openness and they want something they want to be able to subscribe to some Channel where they get a range of things And not just what five people in a room at

Netflix like okay moving to Spotify okay now this is once again a model that is unsustainable really least unsustainable from those from the songwriters point of view yeah I looked at Spotify when they went public and I remember this is something I don't think the other music writers did I actually got all their public disclosures and their filings You know and back in my early days once again I did an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange so I I I've done junk bond off I've done things in my in the capital days of my

youth Rick that our experiences other people don't have right so I know how to read a public filing okay and the first thing I saw that blew my mind in this Spotify public filing is there was no lockup now what do I mean there's no lockup well when I did an IPO The first thing the investment Banks and the shareholders and everybody demanded is insiders could not sell any of their shares until six months it elapsed after the public filing and you can understand why they would insist on this of course because we have more

knowledge than they do yeah and so they don't want us to listen the stockings us dump all our shares and then six months later they want this right this company is a Dog yeah and I had never heard of a stock listing in which the Insiders didn't have to sign a lockup but one thing to Spotify is there is no restriction on any shareholder selling their shares from the moment this thing hits the market well that's a red flag and you know there were all these record labels that were shareholders of Spotify yeah and uh

Sony dumped their shares and Warners bumped their shares yeah Universal Music Holds some but it was amazing how quickly these people were running so they figured it out and got out he told that they see they know the the inside deals we don't know that's right they're negotiating with Spotify yeah and so on well that's an obvious red flag so anyway I remember writing that when the IPO happened and now Spotify shares tanked the other day so it's actually below the IPO price of four years ago after four years to ask your Market had gone

up 30 40 that time Spotify shares had gone down so I went and Revisited what I had written the exact words of what I had written in 2018. yeah and when I I I I I I didn't remember this I said there are problems there but they're not going to materialize for 24 to 36 months right and if you look at the Spotify share price I'm going to Pat myself on the back it reached its peak between 24 and 36 months after the IPO and then tanked So once again I should go into I should

go into giving stock market tips I made a wrong decision doing all this music writing but the bottom line is the Spotify model I don't think Spotify is going away and as I said I think it would actually be better for our music culture if it did go away and we could build something better it will continue but there is not going to be enough money it generates from music to keep everybody happy Because they have to pay Publishers they have to pay uh composers they have to pay record labels uh musicians well they can't

keep anyone happy because their stock their stockholders are not happy the musicians are not happy nobody's happy with it there's not enough money generated for music streaming yeah to pay all the bills and profits and make everybody happy and so you what I predicted back then was that Some people would benefit disproportionately the people that were actually inside at the table when deals were negotiated would do okay but the people that weren't sitting at the table were going to exist on crumbs and I feared that the musicians would get the short end of the stick

and this is another thing where I'm very careful about what I say because I I can't prove these things but based on The few documents that have been leaked I suspect it if we could actually see the details of the terms between Spotify and the record labels particularly the large powerful record labels we would be horrified I can't prove that uh but I'll just give you one more example uh hey and if someone knows anything or has any documents please leak them to Ted no I know I guess I want to be very careful about

what I say I cannot prove That that evil doings are happening I just I have a hunch that if we could see what those documents were we would be unsettling I did see something just the other day saying this is an article that was just published two days ago and it said it looks like the major labels have so much influence on Spotify playlist you can almost say they control them and I go back to what I was telling you before I find the most exciting music now is Indian Self-produced so what does it mean

for our broader musical culture when those are precisely the tracks that are being excluded from the playlist so once again I I only have bits and pieces of information but my prediction I wish it was a cheerier prediction is I don't think spotify's going away but I don't think it will ever generate sufficient cash from music to pay off all the stakeholders and I fear a world In which the musicians who create the fundamental artistic work on which all the money is made because if that song did not exist there would be no money right

I fear that the people that have the creativity to do that are going to get the least amount of the rewards and I find that trouble I want to talk about super vinyl tell us about super vinyl what what is that well Super Final in fact some people use the term superfinal in a Different way than I do so let me clarify okay what do I mean I am amazed and once again a little horrified that the hottest technology in the music industry is something that was invented 70 years ago right which is the vinyl

record yeah and what other industry is putting all its stakes and and investment in a 70 year old technology and let me push you even further it's a data storage technology so think of What's happened in data storage right since 1948 or 49 when the long playing album was invented um and I asked myself this couldn't we have something that was we'd like a vinyl arm but better right isn't there an opportunity now to do what do you might do vinyl better do vinyl better and I think it would have all the advantages of vinyl

one of the great advantages of vinyl is ownership is when people own a Record they're more committed to the music more committed to the artist they enjoy it more I you and I are old fogies we remember that when you were young and you went to a friend's house the first thing you did is you looked at the record class right because this was their personal identity that's right it defined their lifestyle it's very interesting how often lifestyle terms come from music you know hip-hop is not just a music genre it's a Lifestyle country is

not just a music it's a people Define their whole life on their music and the ownership is is a powerful Force for them to express themselves and and I believe and obviously it's more profitable for the musicians when you could sell an album you made so much more than streams so I believe that the that if I were running the zoo not that they would ever put me in charge of one of these big music Companies or whatever but if I had making decisions I would invest in developing what I call Super vinyl which would

be a a vinyl type product but with better sound quality it doesn't have the scratches better durability uh and there's all sorts of bells and whistles you could put from if you in terms of blockchain and ft I mean there's all sorts of things you could do to make a better vinyl album with all in the liner notes would come back and you'd see Photos of the band again which you never see that's right and the names of the musicians which they won't tell you on the new platforms who produced the record I know like

a secret it's almost like these are drug deals you can't tell anymore go tell people who produce that off now but you know so my idea was it would be to have uh this super vinyl product that would Revitalize ownership and would be a collectible I have better audio quality and let me just make one More point on this most people nowadays when they listen to music they listen to it on on a handheld device right or on a small device yeah which has crappy sound crappy sound you know and I say I had a

better sound system when I was 16 years old than most people use nowadays that's right and and then I ask is there a single other form of entertainment or culture in which the quality of the medium has declined so let's look at TVs won't TVs Have gotten bigger and better oh my God all the time movies they've got the surround sound now and movies are so much better video games I remember like pong it's been a video game every other technology that's right has improved the user experience except one right which is music well duh

people want to know why or why music sales so bad you know why why aren't people listening to this new band well duh if if over a period Of decades you actually make the audio quality worse and the experience what do you expect and let me make one more Point people will say well these record labels are not equipped to do consumer products Innovation tab what do they know about I said if you go back a number of years the most Innovative company in consumer electronics and products was a record label it's called RCA It

was a powerful record label that everyone from Elvis Presley uh to Duke Ellington recorded on RCA George Gershwin recorded for RCA Caruso the great operation everybody recorded for RCA but they also invented liquid crystal display screens they made some of the best microphones the best microphones yeah stereo sound they commercialized right uh the my first color tv we had when I was a kid was an RCA and let me Tell you what why they did this this is fascinating and I think it's a great role model RCA also owned MBC TV station yeah I remember

that and they wanted to get people more excited in the TV shows and then we're gonna have color TV shows that color television was intended to enhance the Artistry of the TV show and RCA did this for decades and finally In the 1970s they lost touch and nowadays no record label spends money on R D as far as I can tell just think of it there was a day in which the Consumer Electronics like RCA was the apple of its day that's right it really was it was a record label a record label was the

was the apple of its day there was a day when the music industry itself was a leadership in consumer technology and they used the technology to uplift the art form What's happened now is they have handled off all the power to Silicon Valley I see there's a war between Northern California and Southern California Southern California's entertainment industry Northern California Silicon Valley and Tech and what they've done is the Silicon Valley people who are shrewd because I I mean I used to work right in the heart of Silicon Valley right I was right in the heart

of it I dealt with all these people I mean I I people I Went to business school with are now billionaires I know how those people think they're just eating Hollywood's lunch ripped their eat in Hollywood's lunch because they're they're shrewd and they're smart and they're controlling the technology decisions and so this gets back to this this this whole larger issue is that we need Innovation and super vinyl is one of them but we in general we need Innovation coming from The record labels themselves that should spend money on R D and they should create

innovations that uplift the music and improve the user experience not make it worse I think that this super vinyl idea is a great idea will anyone ever do anything about this first of all whoever's CEO at Apple or Google I tell you they do they control our music culture but they're not making decisions on the basis of the music yeah music for them is a lost leader Apple Would give away the music for free if they could sell more of these that's right Google would give away music for free to sell more advertising on YouTube

absolutely I mean every everybody has got a some priority higher than the music and so then I say well we need something exciting so people will listen to it on more than just a phone how do you convince people to do this because people will say oh everyone's perfectly happy With what they've got well people are always happy with what they've got and I remember Steve Jobs when he said why he did the iPhone as if people won't know what they want until we show it to them right they're not until we show I didn't

realize that I needed an iPhone back in the year 2000. you know I many of these Innovations until you see them you don't know and so I will say the way you get people excited about a better audio Experience is through Innovation and you create something that when they see it they say wow I need that well I will say something nice about Apple I do use Apple products I made a video years ago where I was frustrated with apple because there are some of their featured apps like the iTunes is completely useless I mean

it is really you know I used to have a library of things that I would take off CDs a lot of people when when iTunes came out They'd put their disk in there they'd rip their songs off there and then they'd sell their CDs right and then all of a sudden all your stuff disappeared or things that you that you rip your personal music that you recorded yourself you could have on on their and I mean it's it it's just gone through all these different terrible versions now I'll say this They have a new Apple

Studio computer that came out that they put the an SD card reader in the front of it for people that are people like me now they made a monitor that's awful that has the worst camera in it imaginable I don't know how they could have screwed this up but at least they have ports on them they're new they're new and this isn't an ad for Apple but their new laptops not I don't have one here but they have they put the SD card readers in they put USB uh regular USB ports back in them they

they've they finally they're making them thicker again instead of like let's make them thinner and thinner and thinner and take everything away and you only have the USBC ports or the light whatever their Thunder Thunderbolt ports so I don't know why there's this change but it's a good change that's that's rare it's rare when you see a company actually backtrack and add features that They had removed so maybe they'll put the headphone jack back in the phone maybe and and I actually am an apple loyalist I think Apple does high quality they're Innovative particularly under

Steve Jobs they're just they're I admire what they've done in many ways my concern is more with a music culture in which the people who are making the decisions don't have their interests aligned with the other people in the music ecosystem and let me make a Comparison back in the old days yep back in the old days guys it's not like a foggy but there was there was a distribution Channel yeah musician would make a record label would release it it would go to these music Distributors I used to work with these people like Mafia

but but they would distribute the record literally literally they were like yeah they would get the music into the record Store and then when someone will come in and buy it yeah everybody in that value chain benefited if people loved music more right the more you love music everybody in that value chain made more money and did better so they were strongly incentivized to get people as excited about music as possible now let's compare the current day what does Spotify want what does Apple music want well first of all Spotify I Am told and once

again I gotta be very careful because I don't know I'm told that in you work at Spotify and you say we're a music company the boss yells at you wow we sell subscriptions we don't well we don't we don't sell we're not a music company we are a subscription we're now I don't know if that's true that's what I've heard yeah but first of all it seems like first of all it tells you they don't view themselves in the same Boat as the rest of us in the music economy right and secondly you ask yourself

who is the most profitable customer for Spotify well it's obviously the person who pays the subscription and listens to that almost no music right so the more passionate you are about music the less money Spotify makes from you so just consider this we went from a system in which when people love music Everybody did well financially that were involved now they do better if you don't much care about the music this is not a small matter yeah and you were talking before do people love music as much as they used oh it's hard to prove

that we have this gut feel that the passion level is dying down but once again I don't blame the the fans there's a whole system out there that is incentivized for people not to care much about music and so when I criticize Apple hey I love Apple for what they do but I still think we would be better in our musical culture if music was run by even those Mafia people at the record Distributors I hated dealing with those people even they at least we're both Italians that's right well I know I know my family's

from Sicily but at least we were better off because even though I hated those people we were in the same boat right they wanted to sell Auto albums I wanted To sell out albums we wanted people to love the music it would be better if we had a business model for the distribution of Music in which people were aligned with the musicians and the fans and everybody wanted to have as an exciting musical culture as possible so last night you and I were talking about the blues now this is a a favorite topic on my

channel I've I've brought this up for years about when the blues left rock music rock music collapsed well the very Few popular songs now that draw on the blues I'm trying to what was the last hit song that had Blues chord changes you know a long time ago you know and and even the sort of that Blues tonality of bending the note yep which is such a powerful thing to hear you know it's one of the most powerful sounds you'll ever hear uh that seems to be slowly moving away from a musical culture because the

model now is what I call more of a mathematical model the idea is every Note you hit dead center in the middle of the tone yep perfectly in tune who can combine I call it the gridification of Music Ted who can complain it's perfectly in tune and everything's in the dead center of the beat um and in many ways what we're doing is we've forgotten the lessons of the last hundred years because you know I've studied musical Innovation this is one of my specialties is what how does musical Innovation take place What situations do you

need for new sounds to emerge and my fundamental belief is that the most significant innovation in music in the 20th century was the mixture of the African sensibility and the Western sensibility in the Blues now why do I say that why do I say that's so important because people want Blues is a tiny genre what is it one half of one percent of of why how can you say the Blues are so important so you got to realize that for 2 500 years up to that point we followed a model which I call the Pythagorean

model it's from Pythagoras if you did geometry and I hate to remind people of their high school geometry but they might remember the Pythagorean theorem and I apologize for bringing up the thing I want to tell you is the Pythagoras who live 2500 years ago invented the notion of playing songs in Tune he invented these scales because he measured the length of a string that you would pluck and he realized that if you change the proportions of the string you could have you know very specific ratios between the notes and by the time he was

done and his followers took over western music everything had to be played perfectly in tune and that was I mean the first thing you when you go to a classical music concert the first thing you do is hear them tune up you must be Everything must be in tune every note is precisely hit where it's supposed to be but what people don't realize is that didn't happen outside the Western World if you were in Africa people people didn't worry about be hitting the note dead center right you know they would bend the note the right

everything was everything was free and liberated there there you didn't hit in the middle of the beat uh the the first uh Western musical Colleges who tried to notate African music they couldn't do it I've got uh studied the records of this they tried to write down what the African musicians were playing I couldn't write it down right you couldn't put it down notate it and so what happened it was an amazing moment in the beginning of the 20th century when the descendants of slaves in the United States started taking that approach to music And

forcing it into the Western system so you had this this blue song that was sort of like a a regular a normal western song yeah but it really wasn't because they're bending the notes I mean if you listen to the blues recordings from the 20s which I love you can say that sun house is playing in East seventh or a dominant quarter what he's just making sounds like he's playing the guitar with a knife I mean I mean he's You can you can sort of say that their chord changes but they really aren't right he's

working within a context of sounds that have no counterpart in Western culture and so you had this amazing moment where 2 500 years of tradition in the west of playing in tune were challenged directly and it forced a whole new way of dealing with music and the first Innovations were Jazz and Blues yep but Then it spread into the every major mainstream commercial style learned from this because it came into r b it came into rock and roll it came into Soul it came into hip-hop it can't even country musicians would be Bend in their

notes absolutely even the kind if you listen to that record that that Louis Armstrong made with Jimmy Rogers in the 20s the even the country musicians were learning for this so this is what I find interesting is it was an amazing Moment in which people learned to get out of this mathematical grid I no longer have to hit the note right dead in the center I no longer have to play the beat right dead in the center I have all this freedom and then all the computerized music tools it was so much easier to so

much easier to go back I mean conceivably software can do all those things it can bend notes but the easiest thing for software To do is that Precision that's right and so I once again I fear that we've lost something we took us a hundred years to break out of the Pythagorean I'm sorry this Pythagorean Paradigm I call it took us 100 years to break out of that Paradigm and I'm worried that we have lost that and we needed something new to shake us up so everything isn't just driven by mathematics so so you talked

about the first time sheet music sold a million Copies Oh Susanna the maple leaf rack these were ways that historically musicians made money until people were able to write things down and you could print them and sell them there was really other than being somewhere and getting paid to play there were no other ways to make money through music make a living through music musicians have always struggled to find a way to make money Because what you're dealing with is something that's intangible yeah and it I found over the years that if you can turn

your creative product into a physical object it's easier to sell the worst example I have a a wife is a dancer how do you monetize a dance I'm not saying it's impossible but it is it's hard to monetize a dance because it just it's a moment in time it's right it's an experience And music is like that too I mean it's it's experience how do you put the experience in a bottle and so musicians have always struggled and I found points in history when they've managed to turn what they do into a physical object all

of a sudden they can make money yep around the year 1600 again and maybe a little bit before you had the birth of music publishing were finally you could publish your music in a book And sell it but I've studied this and it was interesting most of the First music books that were published only sold about 500 copies or in fact the print ones were 500 or a thousand and often the composer had to subsidize it so it was like it's like today you know it's no difference I've been there done that you know but

finally at some point during the 19th century this changed Oh Susanna by Stephen Foster sold a bunch of copies although people immediately Tried to Pirate it um the Maple Leaf Rag allegedly sold a million copies which seems impossible because I can't imagine there were a million people that could play that piece that's right I played that piece of the piano that's a that's a technically but at least they bought the sheet music and that's the beauty that's the beauty when you turn into a physical product it's like me I write books I get paid the

royalty when they buy the book I don't have to wait till they read it so that's you know that's right I'd wait till they read it you know um but the one of the problems we've had now is that during the course of the 20th century musicians made a lot of money turning their music into physical objects not just sheet music then it became records and compact discs and cassette tapes yeah uh and that disappeared over the last Couple decades it's coming back now it's coming back in a bizarre way these non-fungible tokens these nfts

I'm just going to ask you about that and I find the whole idea bizarre because you make more money selling uh you turn your song into a non-fungible token and you make a small number of copies maybe even only one you can make more money selling that nft to one person one person that you can Then to show your music with conceivably that's right and okay I've got mixed feels on the one hand I'm happy about this and I do believe musicians can make money selling non-fungible tokens I've been studying this okay and as bizarre

as this is it is a way to make money and they're and they're musicians out there that are bringing an income that they never had before yep turning their music into an nft But I am troubled once again by a culture in which you can make more money selling to one wealthy collector then sharing your music with millions of people so I do believe we need that's why I'm I'm such a big thing on this super vinyl or anything yes that gives a musician a chance to sell something more than a t-shirt at the gig

right I'm completely in favor of it and not Just okay obviously I'm Pro musician but I also think this is for the fan too absolutely I don't I mean I I don't think that the musicians and the and the fans have adversarial relationships I really believe they're if I get the fan excited by my music we both benefit in that so yes the sheet music was a forerunner of this but we need something like that now for you know the digital age and there are things out there but I Still don't think we found the

final solution I have all sorts of crazy ideas I have this article called strange predictions about nfts I actually think we could have a situation in which you sell your music to a fan and they actually end up with an ownership stake in it so that if they can get more fans for you they may that they make money and it's all going through a blockchain and and and you don't need to trust your manager or the Record label anymore right and and ways to create Financial incentives so that both the fan and the musician

both benefit financially from the success of a song it's not happening now but I believe within five years it will be and those kind of relationships could be truly transformative so the these web three applications nfts and and and things like that could be concert tickets could be uh fan club access uh so you think within five years That people because it takes a long time for people to adopt things right even like a debit card you know people used to use cash all the time now people then people went to debit cards and people

rarely use cash I can't remember the last time I yeah people you're paying cash what it's it's an odd thing and somebody needs to have have to have a an account you know with cryptocurrency or Something like that and then they have to get used to having that and they have to get used to buying this and buying that and it takes adoption of these things takes years for people to feel comfortable that they understand what it is and is that five years or is that 20 years what do you think well there's an adoption

curve and I've actually studied this you know I used to study with Everett Rogers the guy who actually in Invented uh the the study of how Innovations go viral and I've even studied the mathematics of it and and there's certain these s-shaped curves and there's an inflection point where something starts to take off yep and I don't think we will reach huge adoption in five years but I think we may hit that inflection curve which starts to accelerate rapidly there's a Moment where twenty percent of people in America had radios and then a moment where

the 80 percent did yep and it seemed to take forever to get to that 20 but once you get to a certain point it accelerates the internet was like that too there was a period where very few people had online access and then over a period of five years it just took off I do believe they're going to be completely new ways of Consuming music probably involving a blockchain of some sort and it's going to be more than just these silly Collectibles it's going to be a genuinely transformative way of financing your album and sharing

the rewards with your fans and I and there's so many people that are doing startups in this and there's so many smart people yeah some of the smartest people in the world right now are working on in this specific issue Now when is it going to go super mainstream well once it's proven itself that will happen faster than people realize I think that that once more tools are developed for people to it just even things like setting up a crypto account you know these things are are it's esoteric to to the average person they don't

even know they hear these terms and it's just like anything you hear terms for a long time and then you don't Know what they are then all of a sudden two years later it's it's like you've known it your whole life just like the iPhone took off you know or or uh or the internet took off you know what is what is this internet thing if somebody told me Rick you're going to be making videos video essays or whatever these are short form or or uh music appreciation videos this is going to be your the

end of your career is going to be that It's not going to be teaching it's not going to be music production that that's what you're going to do I never would have believed that well it's the same for me you know I write on sub stack now 18 months ago I don't even know what sub stack was right but then when I saw the business model we were going to pay you 90 you control all the intellectual property you control the email okay I'm jumping on I'm jumping on this ship before it sails uh and

and so Who knows what the next five ten years are if you had to go through enormous Hoops to get onto YouTube you're not going to do it they have to make it easy for you right they made it easy for me to get on to to sub stack these new Innovations in music if they make it easy for the musician to do it and there's money to be had the world will change rapidly well musicians have had to adapt there's no question about that since the uh Since the Advent of Home recording gear through

uh digital audio workstations and they've done it they've learned how to produce their own records at home on laptops they've learned how to put their music out there on platforms whether it's band camp or SoundCloud or getting it on Spotify or getting it on on Apple music and these are things that you know once again unimaginable 25 years ago 30 years ago when I started in the music business That um that I think is a great thing I think it's great that musicians have had to figure out these new skills just like I've had to

figure out how to make videos I never even owned a camera before I started my YouTube channel I did my first videos were on an iPhone and and Now iPhones are good enough for any kind of phones are good enough that you can make Pretty much make any content on those and you can make a movie on your phone move it you know you can move it on your phone so so these are really positive developments I want to ask you about one more thing Ted so I want to ask you about Bach okay yeah

I wasn't expecting that question okay I want to ask you about Bach are there musicians like Bach that still exist or or are there singular musicians that have Lived over time that are just so unique well Bach is an interesting question and I end up spending a lot of time thinking and talking about Bach and it's mostly my son I've got a my youngest son Thomas is passionately devoted to Bach and and during covert he was studying philosophy at Harvard and they sent him home because you have to go home And I think about spending

a lot of money for this tuition and he's going to be home and and uh he came home and he said dad I'm going to use the pandemic productively I'm gonna play Bach an hour or two every day and literally that's the only I mean that's pretty much the only composer he plays right he's just Goldberg Variations well-tempered clavier French with and at dinner he wants to talk about Bach I mean this is This isn't you know we so we have these long discussions who's the best pianist for Bach and you know which cantatas are

the best I mean so I'm always uh I'm always talking to him about Bach because it's you know and I love Bach too so I love Bach too but there's a one of the questions I asked I think I even asked this on Twitter recently is you know bot compost Fuchs who's the greatest Feud composer alive today and it's like oh there is none right and That's a side exaggeration but there's nobody can do that stuff right right there is there is nobody right who can do some of that Counterpoint and I think it's because

Bach conceived music different than you and you and I think in terms of chords Rhythm Melody Bach is thinking in terms of multiple sure melodic lines happening simultaneously yeah and he just conceived a music Dimension that's right he's conceived a music in a way Uh that that people don't now and even in his day and I and sometimes people say well bogged another dead white male but my I said well tell me the person that I haven't heard of that composed fugues as well as Bach right who is that person right and I said I'll

save you some time because I have looked into this that person does not exist well it's it's also like how many deaf composers are there well I mean no I mean it's like Beethoven and and so let me let me make a let me counter and soften what I just said yes in my heart of hearts I do believe music's Talent does not disappear from generation to generation right we were talking about this lesson there is somebody out there as good as a Bach or a Beethoven or if there isn't now there will be in

a few years or whatever the problem now is not whether that music Talent exists it's whether we'll ever hear it right And I'm going to give one I'm going to tell you this this is my crazy idea of what Ted would do if I ran a major record label this is why they will never let me run a major record label but this is what I would do I would first try to find out what are the best music schools in the world give me five or six I don't know what I hear Juilliard Brook

I don't know what they are but I would have somebody Research they go with Ted these are the best music schools these are the five best music schools in the world so I would go to each one I would spend several weeks and I would go to all the professors I'd go to the students I'd go to and I would go to everyone I have the same question who are the most talented people here you're a student who's the one student that you really just think is a genius and I would do this at the

five best Musical and for each one I would identify the five best students I have now 25 names on a list and I'd call them together so I said you know I've been to the best music schools and I'm told that you are the greatest musical Talent of anybody in these schools I'm giving each of you a check for fifty thousand dollars want you to make an album you can do any kind of album you have a rock band you Can play reggae you can write Fuchs your movie soundtrack you can do a country album

you could do an hour of Silence I don't care but I am backing you because I've tried as well as I can that to find the best of the best and maybe I did the wrong method I tried to find the best of the best and now I'm going to support you go do it I think they would come up with at least Some stuff that would blow our mind I would do it every year every year I would have those 25 people it cost nothing right 25 people 50 000. and you and I both

know that okay maybe some of them would do bizarre stuff maybe some people who do non-commercial stuff but some of those somebody's going to come up with something somebody's going to blow our mind because we've tried we at least we tried to find the best And at an early stage in their vocation back them yeah and let them run with it so I don't I believe there is a Bach and a Beethoven out there what we need to do is as the people who are stewards of the industry and you and I haven't well it's

not as much influence as we would like we have at least the we have the ability to to express our opinions and and they would never let me run a record label or do this but this is what I would do because this is the only way we're going To find that next block or Beethoven because that person is out there let's discover them I love it Ted thank you so much for being my guest today this has been so insightful I thought this would be fun and it's been a blast and I want everybody

to uh check out Ted's sub stack it's called The Honest broker and I'm going to spell my name because I've got the last name is spelled g-i-o-i-a that's four valves in a row But if you look uh search on my name or on the honest broker I'll take you to my sub stack and you can subscribe for free or you can pay if you want and I love that but you can subscribe for free so I urge everybody to go to my website and sign up and also don't forget to subscribe to Ted's YouTube channel

yes thank you very much thank you so much appreciate it it was great being here thanks