Own Your Content

Business brain, episode 636 for Wednesday, April 2nd. National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas, some thoughts, some things, some stuff we've encountered, we analyze it, we use it to help tune our business brains so that we can eat each keep on living those charmed lives here in Durham, New Hampshire, on PB&J Day. I love a good PB&J. I'm Dave Hamilton here in Northern California.

I'm Shannon Jean, and I want to tell you, I've had a PB&J in the last 12. Well, let's just say 24 hours.

Yeah, I've had one in the last three hours. So, yes, there you go.

I love them too.

Oh, yeah.

On Toasted, I had mine. I guarantee mine was probably different. I had mine on a toasted brioche.

Oh, wow.

Fancy. It was very nice.

Yeah, that's a high flu.

Very bougie.

There's nothing wrong with a bougie PB&J.

It was glorious.

I like the, like bougie peanut butter and a nice strawberry preserves. Me too.

Me too. And I. I love to have it with a side of barbecue potato chips, because you get that savory and sweet.

Woo. Yeah, man, Is that. That's good. Yeah, that's good.

But that's it. That's it. So what are we talking about today?

Yeah, I was at south by Southwest recently.

Yeah.

And you know, I, I. South by is an interesting conference for me. I go there for a lot of reasons, Meetings with people. And more and more of those are happening now that more industries that I'm involved in, of using Southwest. South. South by Southwest as a home base. But there are three conferences, convergence of. Yeah, it's different stuff.

Kind of like context and the CES show, how they eventually became one show.

Yeah, well. But south by just keeps adding their own. They're not bringing other things in. Right. But. But like, now there's starting to be a podcasting segment as part of the tech conference. And so that means that, like, people that would not have gone in the past now go. And so I get to meet with some of those f. Which is great. So there are three conferences that happen kind of as part of south by Southwest. Four, really, if you count the education one. But evidently I didn't. So there's the tech conference, there's the music conference, and there's a film conference, and there's things that, Excuse me, Happen at all of those, you know, in each of those Conferences. And I. I look at them ahead of time and I build a schedule, and it's like, okay, I want to do this. I want to do this. I want to see this. I want to attend this talk. I want to see this band. I want to see film. What's interesting is that, you know, I go with three of my podcasts in mind, Right. This one, of course, MacGeek, Gab, which is the show that I do for tech, and then Giggab, which I do for musicians. And what's interesting is when I build my schedule, I'll have it in my head like, oh, this will be something I'll cover on gig Gab. Or this will be something I'll cover on business or whatever. Yeah. More often than I would predict, I wind up changing my decision as to where the coverage is going to go as I learn more about the thing. And that was certainly the case when I went to see Strange Journey, which is a documentary that's been produced. And I don't know if it has distribution yet, but of course they're working on it. That's what the film festival is about. One of the purposes, Strange Journey, the story of Rocky Horror. Now, as a drummer, I have played drums in the Rocky Horror musical probably a hundred times, you know.

Right, nice.

And so I thought, okay, well. And I've talked about that on Gig Gab over the years. So I thought, of course, this will be a gig Gab thing. And I went to see the movie. The first thing that was really interesting to me was in line for the movie. Obviously, there were other Rocky Horror fans, interested people around me, and when I said to them, I admitted to them, which still remains true, that I have never seen the movie Rocky. I've never seen clips from the audience. I'd never even seen clips until the documentary. From the audience perspective, I've never seen the musical either. I've only seen it from, like, upstage center, where my drum set is. Yeah. Now I understand the story. It took a little while to, you know, to be able to memorize the show enough to be able to pay attention to what else was going on on stage. But, you know, you do it a hundred times, it's just kind of happens whether you want it to or not. Yeah. And as I was saying this to people, they're like, wow, that's really. That's an interesting thing. And like, yep. And they said, I didn't even know there was a musical, was what most of these people said. Everybody around me, no one around me in line knew that there was.

I didn't know it either. You mentioned this to me last week.

Yes.

What, that. I just thought it was just the movie.

Right, right. Well, it turns out the musical came first. And it was. As I. As I watched the movie, I decided this was definitely a business brand thing. But, yes, for those of you out there, the musical came first. It was created by a guy named. Primarily by a guy named Richard o'. Brien. His son, Linus o', Brien directed and produced the documentary. So. Which was great because obviously he had access to. You know, we always talk about what's your unfair competitive advantage in whatever business you're in. Linus's is that his dad created the thing that he was doing a movie about. So he had access to the right people to make a documentary. And he did a. It is a fantastic movie. If you get a chance to see it, even if you're not a Rocky Horror fan, you're gonna want to watch it. So they explain how this started as a musical. It did very well in London. It was, like, immediately sold out as soon as they kind of started. Obviously they created it first, but once it hit, it kind of became this. This. You know, there was. There was a buzz about it and it was hard to get tickets and all those things. They eventually brought it to la. And I'm skipping over a lot because you're going to see that when you watch the movie, folks. But they eventually brought it to LA and showed it at the Roxy Theater, which is a stage, but has kind of a theatrical. It feels like a. Like a theater and a place where you could go see a rock show. Right. You know, Frank Zappa's fam album After Roxy was. Was at that same theater. But so they did it there, and Lou Adler saw it there and said, okay, this. I can make a movie of this. And so he would. He brought people around to, you know, kind of buy into the vision and buy into the project and all that stuff. And it was. And one of the pieces that was really interesting was Richard o', Brien, who plays Riff Raff. If you've ever seen the movie or the play or the musical, rather, Richard o' Brien not only wrote the songs and conceived of the whole thing and wrote it, he starred in it as riffraff. Including the movie, which is an interesting thing. He had people approaching him, especially after it was in LA or while it was in la. People like, you know, Mick Jagger, like, folks with money, were like, oh, hey, I want to make a movie of this. I just want to buy the Rights from you. And Lou Adler told him, don't do that. And he said, why not? Because then you don't get to own it.

Yeah.

And so they produced it themselves. Well, Lou was part of the production.

Okay.

They were able to keep their rights while partnering with people who were going to produce it. Not just selling to people who were going to produce.

Sure.

But they had. It meant they had some risk in the game. Right. You know, if you want to potentially have the upside, you got to have the. The risk in it. And so they did. They produced this movie on a shoestring budget. It was less than a million dollars to produce this movie. And they were able to keep many of the same cast that had been in the musical, which was atypical. It's still atypical to do that, Obviously. They brought Meatloaf and they brought Susan Sarandon and a couple other people were brought in to. To play roles. But by and large, you know, you see Richard o', Brien, he's in the movie. You see. My gosh, why can't I think of it? Tim Curry.

Tim Curry, yeah.

He was from.

He was in the stage.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, they. They did that. They produced the movie. Okay. Now they release the movie. It flops for the most part, they put it. And I didn't mark down the town. I probably did, actually, but. Oh, yeah, they previewed the movie in Santa Barbara, California. And Santa Barbara, they pointed out, is an interesting town because it's full of half college kids and half. That's right. Senior citizens. Ah, okay. So they watched as people were coming out of the film early, you know, And. And mostly the people that were coming out of the film when the film finally ended were the college students. That's who was left. So they're like. Okay, so. And they're. But the smart thing was, is they were just paying attention. They were. They were failing and learning. Right.

And capturing the data.

Yeah. Even if it was just anecdotal data. Right. Okay. So. But this is the value of anecdotal data. And the plural of anecdote is not data. So anecdotal information is maybe the right way to say this. Yeah. So they, you know, they noticed. Okay. College students. All right. Okay. So maybe there's a. Like, maybe that's our market. You know, younger people might get this and be into it. And at this point, none of the callbacks or any of those things that we as a culture know about Rocky Horror, there was none of the callbacks.

To the screen, none of the singing.

Throwing the rice yet, by the way, if you're going to go see the musical, don't bring stuff to throw. It turns out those of us on stage, we're real, so we don't want stuff thrown at us. But none of that existed at this point, Right. It was just the show. And it was built to be this campy thing, you know, it was built to be tongue in cheek might be the. Not be the right word. But, you know, they knew what they were creating, sort of. And so they said, okay, great. College students, all right, they're trying. In theaters are like, well, you know, I don't know. Finally they said, all right, well, what if we show it at midnight? You know, that this way we're not taking money out of your pocket. You can run three shows. We're just adding a thing, and all you gotta do is pay a projectionist, and you probably sell enough tickets to offset that cost. And so they did this in two theaters to start the Waverly in New York City, and ironically, the Paramount in Austin, which it turns out is the theater that I was sitting in watching the world premiere of this, which was cool, right? And so they would, you know, these two theaters agreed to run it Friday, Saturday night. And so they kind of, the partners in the thing said, okay, well, you know, you call on Monday mornings, you call New York, I'll call Austin, and.

We'Ll just find out, see how it goes.

See how it goes. See how it's been so, like, three weeks in. Lou Adler calls Austin on the third Monday or whatever and says, how'd it go? And the theater manager says, now it's worth noting because I was in the theater experiencing this. The paramount holds about 1200 people. It is a large movie theater. It's. It's where they host all the premier. The world premieres at south by Southwest. It's a gorgeous theater. The seats are horribly uncomfortable, but it's a gorgeous theater. And. And so they call the manager. How was it? Yeah, you know, about 50 people for each performance. And Lou's like, oh, hmm, okay. I don't know. And the guy says, yeah, but here's something interesting. It's the same 50 people.

And coming back.

Yeah. And Lou said, okay, that is important information. And they were finding the same thing in New York. And they're like, all right, all we. What we need to do is just put this out there and let the right people find it. And, of course, putting it in the right markets, you know, that would have the right kind of people. And. And. And sure enough, you know, it today now, of course is the longest running movie ever. And I don't, I can't imagine what it will take for something to beat that because it still runs every weekend somewhere.

Yeah, somewhere.

Not just somewhere, many somewheres. Right? Yeah.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

And so they didn't find their audience, the audience found them. But this is, it's just like the idea of paying attention to what your pivot is going to be with your, you know, with your, with your business. Right. And you know, this was two theaters. This is April of 1976, it was in two theaters. By 1978, it was in 50 theaters. Right now it's in hundreds of theaters. Right. The shout outs, all of that audience participation stuff, that didn't start until September of 1976. The whole idea of wearing costumes didn't start until Halloween performance. And then of course it was like, well, we could do this for every performance. And it developed a community. And you know, they said something interesting. I mean, there's a cult around this, right? I mean, there's a cult.

Did they say how much revenue it's generated?

They did not, no. But. But Richard o' Brien did say it turns out that creating something like this is a heck of an annuity.

I could imagine, right? Yeah.

Like, yeah, now it's in, you know, two to 300 theaters every weekend. There's more in October. They'll, you know, create theaters for it to play in, in October. But you know, it, it. They said something which, which really, you know, it was. You don't make cults, audiences make cults. It's true. And once you've. I've been involved in things that started like this. I was involved in a production called Bitter Pill years ago and we put it together. It was this weird thing where there was music and live performance. And it's very hard to describe it. It was basically live performance, acted, music videos. That's not nearly enough of a description of it, but that's as close as we need to get here. And it was the same thing. We booked a three week run. We put this thing out after the first night. The rest of the run was sold out. Half of those tickets were sold to the same people. They wanted to see it. And then the rest were people clamoring to get in the door to this place. And it was like, okay, wait a minute, we've got something here. Unfortunately, there were too many different creative minds at work and there was a huge clash. And it never really went anywhere after that.

But I looked it Up. So it's about totals about 500 million in revenue. 140 million in lifetime box office. 200 million. These are estimates. Media, DVD, VHS, all that stuff. 50 million merchandise sales, licensing and live performances. 75 million soundtrack sales. 35 million 500 million. That's a lot.

That's a lot of money.

The lesson here is, you know, obviously the pivot, everything else. But yeah, you want to own your content. You can share it on social media if you want. Of course, share it, but you must own it. And because you will get that residuals in one way or another, it may not be monetary like this, but it will be, you know, you can get your customers and your credibility and all that kind of stuff. So you must own. You create your content offline and then you can share it, but you retain ownership of it. Yep, yep.

And that's awesome. And if you want an example of the opposite of that, you know, look at somebody like, who was also at south by Southwest, John Fogarty. Right. He just recently, in the last few years got the rights to all of his songs back, but he spent most of his life and career not owning the rights at all to any of those Credence songs. And it was because they signed a bad contract. You know, it happens all the time.

It's a cautionary tale over and over and over and over. Young artists, right. Trying to get ahead just doesn't.

It's very, very tempting. Like even in this. Richard o' Brien was like, wait, why don't I want to sell the rights? This is, this is, I did this. And Lou Adler's like. Because then you can't do it yourself. That hugely valuable. So. Yep. Yeah.

Awesome.

Yeah, Good story. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, hopefully the movie will get distribution and, and you'll be able to see it and we'll, we'll let you know. We'll keep an eye on it. But yeah, very, very well done. And, and I, I skipped over many, many things. I obviously focused on the business aspect of it here, but, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really good stuff.

So, so I want to share.

We're. We don't really have a whole. We're at like the 20 minute mark, man.

Yeah, I'm. I, I was just gonna say I want to share this story, but I think I'll save it.

You want to save it. Great.

Yeah, it's worth. So I agree. Yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll do it next week or, or the following week. It's just this. We'll do the story of a conversation I had with a billionaire that really resonated with me and a lot of other people. I posted it on my, my X feed this weekend and there's a lot of nuance to it that we can break down. I think it would be worthwhile.

Yeah.

But thanks for sharing that. I thought it was fascinating.

Great. It's fascinating. Yeah, really. Like I said, you know, I thought it was going to be a gigab thing and then I got 30 minutes in, it was like, oh, man, what a business. Holy crap. Yeah, yeah.

Own your content.

Own your content. Absolutely. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Feedback at BusinessBrain show where we own all of our content but you own all you do is give us a non exclusive right to your emails to share them in the show. They remain yours. There it is. We'll see on Friday.