Episode #303 – Ghosted Songs, Illegal Tribute Bands, And Music Consultant Jay Gilbert

Welcome to Bobby Ossinski's Inner Circle. I'm Bobby Ossinski, and this is a show all about music, music production, and the music business. My guest this week is music digital strategy consultant Jay Gilbert. First of all, have you ever gone to a playlist on Spotify or Apple Music or any other of the streaming services and and found that there were songs that were grayed out, or you did a search on any of those services and you found the song you wanted or the album you wanted, but it was grayed out? Well, this is what's known as ghosting. It used to be you would buy some physical product, a cassette, a CD, piece of vinyl, and it was yours forever. You can play it forever. There was no problem. You owned it and you always had that music. But that's not the case these days because what's happening is songs can disappear from streaming services for a number of reasons. Non-payment to the distributor, for instance. So that would be if you use TuneCore, CD Baby, Ditto Music, any of those, and you don't pay when it's time. Well, guess what? Your music will disappear from the streaming services. Another reason could be maybe the rights reverted back to the artist. So record label had it. Suddenly the rights go back to the artist, but the record label doesn't care because they no longer have control over it. Guess what? Your music goes away until you resubmit it. And unfortunately, many artists don't resubmit because they can't afford to. It costs money on any of those music distributors. And sometimes, especially if you have a volume of work, if you have multiple albums, Sometimes it costs too much. Now there are ways around this, but to many artists who aren't terribly sophisticated with this, they might just look at the price and say, you know what, it's not worth it. Therefore, guess what? Your music is gone. This could happen with YouTube as well. So it's not exclusive just on streaming services. Sometimes labels and publishers get sold. And the problem is that all rights holders must agree. And if they don't, guess what? There's a legal hold on your music, and therefore it's ghosted. You no longer see it on the streaming service. So in the grand scheme of things, it takes somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 streams per year in order to make a song pay for itself. In other words, pay enough money back to the artist or whoever controls the rights So it doesn't cost them money. And again, this may be too much for some artists and maybe not attainable in terms of what these streaming numbers are. So we always had these illusions that we'd have deep, deep catalog because of all this, that artists that never got a voice would be able to hear. That thinking might've been a little too optimistic. If you have any questions or comments, send them to questions@bobbyinnercircle.com. Don't forget about my online courses on mixing, production, branding, and music business success at bobbyosinskicourses.com. Also, get an expert analysis and objective opinion of your songs and mixes as a member of my Hitmakers Club. Go to hitmakersclub.com to learn more. Now here's an interesting question. Are tribute acts legal? Many of them are raking in some really big money. There are bands like Arrival from Sweden, which is an ABBA tribute band. There's Brit Floyd, which is a Pink Floyd tribute band. The Fab Four for the Beatles, Damage Incorporated for Metallica, Almost Kiss for Kiss, Hotel California for the Eagles. There are tons of tribute bands. And the fact of the matter is they can gross over $10,000 a night. As a matter of fact, a survey found that most band members make about $500 per night, which isn't bad if you're a musician. Now, it turns out the Tribute Acts technically fall into a gray area. If you're just a cover band, well, there's not a problem because the PROs like BMI and ASCAP They actually collect the money for that, or they're supposed to, from the venue. So there's no problem. However, a tribute band pushes the edge of all of this. And what you find, it can come really close to violating the original artist's rights. The problem is that tribute bands trade off the name and the brand and the images of the original act. And sometimes the original act can take so much and can't take anymore. So for instance, last year, 15 ABBA tribute acts received cease and desist notices from the band's attorney. It's pretty amazing because I never would have thought there would be 15 ABBA tribute acts, but yet there are, and yet they receive notices to cease and desist. What brought this all up was a very interesting article from lawyerdrummer.com all about this, and there were some suggestions if you are part of a tribute act One is don't violate the copyright or trademark, so you can't use the logos and even the fonts of the original act unless consent is given. The second thing is you can't confuse consumers. In other words, your advertising has to be very distinct about the differences between the original act and the tribute act. If it looks too much like it's the original act that's going to be performing, then you violated their copyright. And the last thing is you can't use words like official or authorized in your marketing unless you have permission from the original act. So getting permission isn't impossible. It's been done before. That being said, sometimes it might be too close for comfort to the original act and might not happen, which means that there's so much to think about if you in fact are part of a tribute band or you know somebody who is. It's possible to do. You can make a lot of money. Just make sure that you don't violate the original act's rights. My guest today is Jay Gilbert, whose love of taking concert photographs eventually translated into being on the cutting edge of digital sales and marketing as an executive with Universal, Sony, and Warner Music groups. Jay has created and executed unique online marketing plans for a wide variety of artists that include Elton John, Kiss, Nirvana, Styx, Rob Zombie, The Police, Bob Marley, Peter Frampton, Amy Grant, and many, many more. He's also led the Fox International digital team on Avatar, The Simpsons, Family Guy, among many others. Jay is also the force behind the excellent Your Morning Coffee newsletter and Music Biz Weekly podcast, as well as being a partner in the artist and label service company Label Magic. During the interview, we spoke about the one thing that artists get wrong with digital strategy, the importance of fundamental artist marketing, the reason why pseudo and unwrapping videos can be so powerful, the importance of radio, and much, much more. I spoke with Jay via Skype from his office in Los Angeles. I want to go back to the beginning with you. How did you get started in the music business?

I was a musician. I played in bands and I thought that was going to be my career. It wasn't. I played with some great musicians, but I wasn't a great musician. I did some touring, did some recording, writing, kind of got the basics. But really, I did a lot of working for Tower Records. That's what I did. So yeah, I wanted to be a musician and then I decided I'd either eat. And I started working in record stores and, you know, did that for like 8 years and just love the music. And, you know, from that, from working in a record store, these reps would come in from, you know, the major distributors and, you know, they had some positions available. And I started with Universal in like 1988, I think, worked there for about 18 years. And that's where it started.

I read somewhere that you did a lot of concert photography when you first started as well.

Yeah, well, I started that as a teenager. I would sneak my camera into any concert I could, every concert that I went to. I just loved photography and shot an internship at a newspaper, and I really loved it. And I still shoot to this day. In fact, tomorrow I'm shooting the Temptations. I did their last album. I've done albums from, you know, Rick Springfield and John Waite and all sorts of folks. That's kind of a weekend, you know, action, and not my living, but it's— it— I love it so much. I do a lot of live photography, studio photography, but that's, you know, kind of what I do on the weekend. So if you need any photos, Bobby, I'm your guy.

Your photos are terrific. The ones on your sites are dynamite. I have a question about that.

Sure.

There's a lot that you do that's in black and white. And I noticed that real photographers have an affinity for black and white. I'm not sure why that is. What do you think?

It's romantic, it's art. I grew up, you know, I had my own darkroom, you know, when I was growing up, and I developed my own photos. And it's just, there's something about the smell and the tactile nature of photography, and I just love black and white photography. The other thing that it does is it takes away all of like Most humans, they don't have smooth, perfect skin, and so especially as you age, you know, you have unevenness with the tones of your face. Black and white evens all of that out. It lets you get away from the distractions and look at the piece, you know, by itself. Right now, I actually do shoots intentionally for black and white, and you shoot them a little differently, and you light them a little bit differently for black and white, and what you do is you're still shooting in color, but as it comes up on the monitor when you shoot, you have it so it goes through a program called Capture One and you have these settings already set. And so it comes up on the screen in black and white. We just did a shoot with Brett James. Now Brett James, you may not know the name, but he's written 18 number one hits including "Jesus Take the Wheel." He's like a Nashville songwriting genius, but he's putting out his own music.

You were part of Universal New Media.

Yeah, I worked at Universal for, you know, for 18 years and started, you know, in the field as a rep. And, you know, the last part of my tenure there was working in their— well, they had a division called ECAT, Electronic Commerce and Advanced Technology Group, and it was led by among other people, Albie Galluten, who I'm sure you know, but a lot of people may not know. He's a record producer. You know, he did not only Saturday Night Fever and Barbra Streisand and things like that, but he did one of my favorite bands, Jellyfish. And so I, I was a huge fan of his. And, you know, that was back in the day when the original Napster just launched, and we were trying to come up with, you know, like Press Play and MusicNet and our own proprietary digital platforms before Apple launched.

Do you know Howard Sirocco? I'm sure you do.

Howard Sirocco is a dear friend.

Yeah, yeah, for me too. And we used to have these discussions all the time and he'd tell me as much as he could, but what I always found interesting was the fact that you guys would see all of the latest and greatest in music technology way before anybody else would see it and be able to make a decision on it way before. That being said, I'm kind of curious because you would obviously see things that were in the gestation stage.

Yeah.

And it must be hard to make a decision on something without really knowing whether it's going to work or how well it's going to work in the future.

Oh, absolutely. And sometimes it surprises you what takes hold, right? Because, you know, in our lifetime, we watched inferior platforms win out, like VHS over Betamax or, you know, things like that. And so it's not always the best that wins. And, you know, there's a lot of folks that love great quality sound, you know, Qobuz and HDtracks and some of these, you know, high-res audio, you know, Amazon HD. And they sound really great. But I think you have to kind of balance convenience and practicality with these things, too. And sometimes that's the difficult part because you get excited. I remember when Howard and I were working together, you know, it was some of these 5.1 and 7.1 really cool surround sound mixes. I think it was called DVD audio at the time. Man, they sounded phenomenal. I got Crowded House's first album and an Elton John album that was mixed for that. It was just such a great experience, but it never really took hold outside of the music aficionados. Although, if I can digress for a second, that Dolby Atmos, I went up in the studio with Greg Penny recently and Michael Etchart and listened to some music in the studio with Dolby Atmos, and I mean, I had tears streaming down my face. It was the most amazing audio experience I've ever had. And look, I'm hoping that that could be something that could take hold, and I know that with Amazon getting behind it, kind of opening it up to to the general public in a way that maybe the music, what would you call it, kind of these audiophiles, I guess, is a bad way of putting it, but some of those folks, they hear all this great music and they see all these great and use all these great devices and things, but some of them don't take hold because they're either expensive or You know, they're not convenient for folks, but I, you know, I'm hoping that Dolby Atmos will kind of cross that line.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. I've had the experience with Greg as well. Uh, he's been a friend for a long time and I was equally as impressed. I've heard it in several different scenarios now. The only thing that I wonder about is, yes, it's been released to the public. Yes, you can get it. But there hasn't been a lot of promotion around it.

Right.

And the thing about it is it's very difficult to promote because the only way you could do it well is if you hear it. And if you can't hear it, you can't tell anybody about it.

They don't get it. Or what do you say? It's immersive. And they go, oh, well, is it surround sound? And it's like, as you know, it's not surround sound. It's, it's something so much deeper and, and better. And you're absolutely right, you, you have to experience it to, to get it. I didn't get it until I went up in the studio and actually, you know, heard it with my own ears. Um, because we've all heard, you know, Quad and 5.1 and, you know, all these different iterations, and, and they're all great in their own way, but this, this is something different. And you know more about, you know, the recording, engineering, producing thing, you know, a million times more than I do, but I can tell you that One of the things that grabbed me about this was that, you know, it can take, you know, these sounds, whether it's a horn section, drums, bass, whatever, and turn them into these objects that it can place anywhere in space around you. So it feels like it's coming from, you know, behind you or from above you or whatever. And for someone who knows what they're doing, like, you know, like Greg Penney, it's magic. And the other thing that I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, 'cause I'm fairly new to this, but one of the things like with DVD audio and some of these surround sound things is that it was difficult if you were, say, in a car listening or listening with headphones, whereas with Dolby Atmos, you know, it kind of knows where that listener is in the room and can kind of situate the sound for the listeners. Is that kind of how you understand it too?

Well, you know, I was in Studio C at Capitol for a demo and I walked around the room and I specifically walked around the perimeter near the walls to see what it would sound like. And you didn't have to be in the sweet spot, unlike with the typical 5.1 or 7.1 where the sweet spot was fairly narrow. This was really wide and I really enjoyed that. Now there's actually something in live sound It's by L-Acoustics. It's called, uh, LiISA. It's the same thing only for live, essentially. And they found that you can't do stereo, as you probably know, in a live situation. But when you use this particular system, 95% of the audience can get the experience.

Really?

Yeah.

That's amazing.

So I think that says it all there, that in fact it's something that's, uh, much more pleasant to be around than, than we've had before. That all being aside, let's talk about what you're doing now.

Sure. Well, I am a partner with my, my partner in crime, Jeff Moskow. He and I run a company called Label Logic. Now, we both worked with major labels, you know, our entire career. And about 6 years ago, we decided that we were, we were ready to move on and, and do our own thing. So what we do is label and artist services. So what is that? Well, it's like we're the label infrastructure. So for a couple of management companies, we are the label, and then we partner with a distribution company. And, and right now, kind of our key distribution company is Ingrooves, you know, which is owned by Universal.

Sure.

And a lot of folks get confused with what a label is and what distribution is, and we help them with that, and we help them to do all the things that label would do. We help them, you know, a lot of this stuff is about planning. You know, you don't want to just drop something in the marketplace. You want to create a demand for it. You want to know who your audience is. You want to run analytics. You want to have your street team together. You want to have all sorts of great tools and assets, and you want to be very deliberate with your release. And we found that that works really well for our company. So we're starting to grow. We have We just brought in a product manager and a social media person, and we're working with some amazing, amazing clients. And it's been, like I said, about 6 years, and I look forward to going to work every single day. No 2 days are the same. I work almost every day and, you know, and love it. It's, it's just been a really, really great ride for the last, you know, 5, 6 years.

Is there a typical online marketing campaign?

No, I think that that's the problem, is when a record company gets overwhelmed, they start doing a kind of a cookie-cutter marketing plan. And what we found is that even with like artists, every marketing plan is different. And, you know, we did a panel at the Music Biz Conference called "A Playlist Is Not a Marketing Plan." And we did that, you know, we had Larry Matera on, you know, from Warner Brothers Records, and Lloyd Hummel from InGrooves, and we had some really smart people on the panel, but basically it was to tell folks, look, are playlists important? Sure, sure, they're important, but it's one piece. You know, when we were talking to Larry, for example, with Warner Brothers, A very small percentage of his spins for his artists came from Spotify-curated playlists or Apple Music-curated playlists. When you or I hear a great new song, we don't rush to dig through playlists. We go to the artist page on our digital service provider. And one of the first things I do when an artist or a management company comes to us and says, can you help? Is I look at their artists and I look at how they're set up. And you gotta have the basic blocking and tackling. And a lot of them, they're just so busy doing the things that they do— writing, recording, touring, you know, all those things. And there's so much to do now with socials and YouTube and digital service providers. So what we do is we, we look at the data and we look at, for example, you know, the, the Spotify artist page. Do they have an artist image, and do they have a banner image, and are there social links there, and do they have their bio, and is it updated, and do they have images? Just simple basic blocking and tackling that's free that they can do. Are they paying attention to that? And then we use different tools to look at, do they know their audience? It's shocking to me sometimes how few artists actually know who their audience is. Because they look out in the crowd and they go, oh, my audience is that. But it's not. If you look at your social audience, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, that audience may not be the same as the people that you see out in the crowd. And then you go to the digital service providers, you know, the Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Deezer, those folks, and rarely do those totally align. So you have basically like 3 audiences, and are you looking at, you know, Spotify for Artists, Apple Music for Artists, all these free analytical tools. And if you don't have the time to do it, you know, I'm sure, you know, you know someone who does, or you could bring somebody on board, whether it's your, you know, husband or wife or girlfriend or whoever in your street team, depending on what level of artist you are. There's so much data out there that what we try to do is take all those different data sources Pull it all together and look at it. But two things. One, what does it really mean? And then number two, how can you make it actionable? How can you take that information and route a tour or bring it to radio or talk to the digital service providers to show them that maybe this, you know, maybe you go to Spotify and go, you know what, this is really overperforming on Apple Music and they're driving most of our business. You guys have missed the boat on this. You know, there's so many things you can do with the data, you know. So our day-to-day thing, to answer your question in a very long-winded way, is that each artist is different and each release is different because there's, you know, there's seasonality, there's, you know, what type of music it is, you know. So yeah, it's every time we have a project, we're starting from ground zero.

You know, you bring up a point that's very interesting, and It's something that I see continually. It's that the fundamentals of just about anything, if you don't get those right, then nothing else really matters. But it's very easy to overlook them as something that's too simplistic, or I'll get to it later, or one of those things.

Yeah.

In sports, it's a big thing. And I think that's why we see championship teams, but you can actually translate it over to what we do as well.

That's a great analogy. It's— and we always call it that, you know, Jeff and I call it basic blocking and tackling. If you don't have your fundamentals down, you know, then you're lost. That's where it's not sexy, right? It's work. One of the things that I talk to artists and managers about all the time is, you know, their YouTube strategy. And everybody thinks, you know, They, "Oh yeah, we post stuff up, we put stuff on YouTube, we got it." But it's so much deeper than that. The basic blocking and tackling is, let's start with when you put your videos up on YouTube, there is this SEO, search engine optimization. There's a way for people to find your music because you'll notice when you're watching videos on YouTube, that right rail, those stacked videos on the right side, That's what's, they're feeding you this based on your habits. And to optimize that so more people see your videos, you have to do things like your file that you upload, it can't say G5392.mp4. It's gotta say artist name, title, it's gotta be something that can be searched. So that's just the file name. And then you can change the thumbnail. It's so easy to do that. If you go on YouTube, you can see all these video thumbnails of people who are blinking or the back of somebody's head. And you're like, that doesn't look compelling. You could take it and it doesn't even have to be a frame from the video, although it can be. You can put anything in that thumbnail that you want. It's super easy to upload, right? So that's part 2. And then the other one that most people miss is just the consistency of the title of your video. So let's say you're an artist and you have 10 videos on your page. It should be artist name, you know, song title, and then version, you know. So Beatles, you know, what, you know, I Saw Her Standing There, and then live or studio or lyric video or whatever. And if you go by that simple simple way of posting it, and you've got your file name, you've got your thumbnail, and you've got that, and then you've got like an intro video to your page, you can double your, your YouTube views. I've seen it happen, you know, just with those simple little basic blocking and tackling. People kind of overthink it, and maybe they put a lot of budget into their concept videos, but the one thing, you know, that I tell clients all the time is Don't worry about spending a ton of money on a concept video. If you meet with, you know, some of the guys at YouTube, they'll tell you when you release like an instant grat focus track or you're releasing a video that you should have multiple videos that roll out over time for that song. Like, the first one might be a pseudo video, and for those that don't know, a pseudo video is just the album art or the track art with the song as the audio bed. You've seen these things on YouTube and probably wondered, well, why is this here? Well, because YouTube's the number one streaming service, you know, not Spotify, and people build playlists out of that because they don't have to subscribe, they don't have to pay, everybody's got YouTube. And sometimes those pseudo videos get more plays than the concept videos. So that's one video. It might be a lyric video. One that always cracks me up, we call it the unwrapping video, and all it is is it could be anything you want, but I have a really great video editor, this guy named John Andosca, who puts these things together for me, and he does a lot of work for Capital. Anyway, it's just somebody unwrapping the CD or vinyl, putting it in the player, putting it on the turntable, and then there might be a glass of wine there or a lava lamp or a dog on the couch, and they put the needle down and you don't even see the person. You're just seeing the thing spin. It's crazy, but When somebody sees that in their social feed, they'll stop and watch it, and we get sometimes so many more views on that silly little unwrapping video. And then there's a, there's a link that, you know, links if they want to hear more. And the last thing I'll say on this, and then I'll stop, I'm sorry if I'm running off, is that that other thing is, you know, having that link there right below your video in your description, and it should be, you know, what we call the smart URL, right? You know, like a Linkfire or Feature.fm or actual SmartURL from Gupta Media, something that it's one link that when they click on it, a landing page pops up and has Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, has everything on there. So, you know, they don't have to run an errand. It's, it's all right there. You do those just basic blocking and tackling things and beautiful things happen.

Jay, fundamentals aside, what's one thing that artists get wrong with digital strategy?

These days, it's they focus too much on trying to get on big playlists. You know, there are ways you can tee yourself up for success with the digital service providers by giving them what they need and listening first. But most of the newer artists that we work with, the first thing they say is like, how do I get on these Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, you know, whatever? How do I get on these big playlists? And the first thing we do is like, well, you know, let's step back a moment. That's, that's part of the plan, you know, but we've seen this happen before where a track will get placed on a big popular playlist, and then typically those larger playlists have a shorter shelf life. You know, maybe you're only on there for a week, maybe you're only on there for 2 weeks, but then you're, you're done. You know, when they pull that song off or it gets deeper into the playlist, Now what? You know, it's a better strategy to be on user-curated playlists, you know, DSP-curated playlists, be on a lot of different playlists and build from there and be everywhere. And the other thing that people miss is that you really want to be in that top, you know, 15 or so tracks because that's where people are engaged. You know, like that's when you're driving to work or you're, you know, you're going to the gym or whatever it is, you're more engaged with the beginning the beginning part of that playlist. So if you're number 295 out of 300 songs in a playlist, there's not gonna be a lot of engagement. We call those dry streams, wordplay intended. And so what we try to do is get people to step back because we meet fairly regularly with the digital service providers, and one of the things we've learned is that people come into them and say, gimme, gimme, gimme, this is what I need. We take an opposite approach. We come in there and go, how can we partner with you? How can we collaborate? What can we do with you? Do you have any programs that you're testing? What they'll tell you is they want early music, really early music, so we do that. We produce these things, it's just basically a PDF, just a beautiful photo of the artist with some, the narrative, with a few bullet points and then a link right from that PDF where they can listen to early music. And that's so important. That narrative is, you know, why should anybody care? Here's 3 sentences of, you know, Bobby Olsinski's got a new album coming out. Okay, well, that's great. Everybody's got a new album coming out. But this is a record he's always wanted to make. You know, it's about a particularly difficult time in his life. It's aspirational, you know, whatever. That narrative is key. In fact, now when you go to Spotify for Artists and you enter your track for consideration for playlists, which, you know, any artist can do by signing up for Spotify for Artists, you have to type in a narrative. So preparing that stuff well in advance, we like to do that because then we're in sync with the artist and management, and then when the PR team is brought on board, they're operating off that same narrative. Then it becomes really powerful. Whenever anybody asks anybody on your team, "Oh, so what's this new project about?" Everybody has that same powerful narrative, and it goes to Spotify and so on and so forth. But to answer your question, I think streaming is so sexy right now, and it's what everybody wants, but it's such a small piece, and there's so much you need to do before you get there. There's also, people will come in, conference call today with a radio promotion person, and he was saying like he gets these calls kind of like that, and it's, hey, I want to be on KROQ, you know, how can you get me on KROQ? It's the same thing, it's like, slow down, cowboy, we'll get there, but let's be deliberate and let's plan this thing out and launch in stages and make sure that we're all flying in formation.

You know, I'm glad you brought that up. Let's talk about radio for a second because it seems to be less influential than ever And if anything, the popular stations seem to be taking their lead from whatever's happening on streaming rather than the other way around.

Yeah, well, it used to be the other way around, right? I mean, it used to be that, you know, the streaming services were watching radio really carefully, and I'm sure they still do, you know, on some level. But I do know from my friends at radio that, you know, because they can get that data, remember that used to be callouts, you know, it used to be so manual, you know, and now they can, Boy, you see right away whether something is viable. And the way that somebody explained it to me from one of the major digital service providers, it was really eye-opening for me. They said that once something hits street date, they know more about it than you do. Before street date, you can promote it and say, oh, this is the greatest thing ever, and we're gonna go on tour, and we have all these drivers, and we have this PR and all this stuff. And that's great, and they want that information, they want all of it. But once it hits street date, they don't need you anymore as a marketer, as a promoter, because now they have something more valuable. They have the data. They know who's listening to it, where they're at, what their demo is, how many times they spun it, you know, if they put in their own personal library. I could go on for hours. They know so much more about what's going on with your music than you could ever know And that was the thing about, you know, radio. We talked about callouts. You know, that's how they would kind of— that was your report card, right? Yeah. Well, now with all the data that's available today, these digital service providers, they have all that at their fingertips.

Okay. So how important is radio in the grand scheme of things to an artist?

I still think it's important. I really do. It may not be what it once was, but it's still how I believe most people still consume music. It's free, it's ubiquitous, it's everywhere. You don't need to have a certain format or player. I still think radio is super, super important, and there are hits that are being broken on radio. Having said that, they've been humbled. There's this, downloading came, and then it's kind of waned a bit and has dropped in popularity, and now it's, You know, streaming and internet radio and all sorts of other ways that people consume music. But still, I believe that radio is still super important.

See, I believe that there's going to be a revolution in radio pending the legislation that makes them pay for artist performance, which—

right—

they haven't done that. So what I see happening is the station groups shedding their probably worst performing stations and much of it going back to local control, which will bring us closer back to the way it used to be where you have, I think, more of a chance to get into the hearts and minds of listeners and radio in particular when you have maybe a local station that's trying to break you, which used to happen, you know, way before the station groups.

Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. I concur. I think it's gotta happen. I think it's going to happen. But I don't think radio's going away. If anything, I think it's gonna be stronger in the end because it's going to be, as you described, it's gonna be hyper-local like it used to be. There's gonna be a sense of ownership for the listenership in those particular markets. As radio grew, it became a little more homogenized, and pretty soon it was like you'd go into any market and you'd find kinda the same selection of stations. I think this could drive that in a really healthy way, but just like the music industry going from physical to digital, I think there's gonna be growing pains.

Well, fingers crossed on that, because it needs some sort of a revolution to happen. Let's go in a slightly different direction for a second. Tell me about your Morning Coffee newsletter and your Music Biz podcast.

Sure. Well, let's start with the podcast. Michael Brandvold, you know, my co-host, he had been running it. I mean, I've been doing it with him for 5 or 6 years, but before that he had done it for years. I met Michael, I was a digital point at Universal, and he was the digital point for Doc McGee and KISS. And so, you know, they were on our roster and we did a lot of work with them. So whenever I wanted to do a promotion or, you know, promote a new record or something around the tour, or use their eCRM, you know, which is a fancy word or abbreviation for email lists, I would go to Michael and we would have these great conversations just on the phone about digital strategy and marketing and sales. And he's not shy, he's got very strong opinions about things. And more often than not, we would agree. And, you know, I was in San Francisco once and we went and had dinner, and I just, I really liked him. We had a lot of conversations, and one day we were just ranting about something, and he goes, you know, you should come on my Music Biz podcast, you know, and we can just do that. And so I came on once or twice, and then And after a little while, it was like we were dating. He goes, "Do you wanna be my partner in this thing?" And I said, "Yeah." And so we do it every week. We never, I mean rarely ever miss a week. We do it every Thursday and then we put them out on Fridays. And we've had folks like you, we've had lawyers, we've had artists, and we just love the conversation. It's just like you and I were sitting in a coffee shop going, what do you think about radio or Dolby Atmos or whatever? And it's just that conversation, you forget that there's other people listening. You're just having such a great conversation. So that's how the podcast kind of came about. And as your morning coffee, it was interesting. I left Warner Music Group a while back. Gosh, how long ago was that? 6, 7 years? It was my last kind of major label job. Oversaw Amazon Music globally for WEA/ADA, which is a Warner company, Warner Brothers company. And after I left, I decided that I wanted to do something different. So I was between jobs and we were talking about, you know, maybe starting Label Logic. And my friend Sean Rakowski, who, who was a sales guy for ADA and left to run a pressing plant in New Jersey, when he was between jobs, he sent me this email and it had, you know, like 10 artists that he really liked. And I noticed there was a whole bunch of people copied on it, and I listened to the music, and he and I are pretty aligned with our musical tastes. And I called him and I said, that was a great email, but, you know, why are you doing that? And he said, well, I don't want people to forget me. And then the light bulb went on in my head, and I thought, that's what I want to do. So I looked at some of the emails that I subscribed to, and I knew I wanted to do something on technology. And I saw something, I think it was Wall Street Journal, it was either that or the New York Times. I think it was Wall Street Journal, and their email was called, um, Your Morning Briefing. And I went, I love that, you know. So I started Your Morning Coffee, kind of stole half of their name. And, uh, it was just my Rolodex. And I know you're not supposed to do that, but I just grabbed my Rolodex and had maybe 200 music industry people and started sending it to them every single Friday morning at 5:00 AM. And then it started to grow from 200, and a couple of weeks ago it passed 10,000.

Wow.

So yeah, it's been, it's been really great. But what it did— and so for people who don't know, Your Morning Coffee is a highly curated look at the music industry every week. It's just a lot of the stories, you know, that I'll pull from, from you, Bobby. You know, when you write things, that I think the audience would love to hear about, I put them in there. And what I do is I put the title of it, you know, who wrote it, and then like maybe 2 or 3 sentences from the story. So if you're busy, if you're in an airport, you can just kind of scan through and get a sense of what's going on. And then if something's really interesting, you can click through. And, you know, with, with emails in the music industry, if you got 16, 17% open rate, that's pretty good. Click-through rate of maybe, I don't know, 2-3%, you're doing pretty well. I noticed right away that I was like over-doubling those numbers, so I knew people were interested and I was watching the data on what kind of things people were listening to, which I'm reading, and which kind of things they were ignoring. And just over time, the best thing that happened from that, and it certainly wasn't planned, was all of a sudden like I would get a call from one of my favorite artists or favorite artist managers or somebody from some big corporation that I read about in the newspaper all the time would call up and go, "Hey kid, I wanna talk to you about such and such." And we started getting some clients from that because as Doc McGee says, and Doc McGee is a longtime client and friend and he's forgotten more about the industry than most people know. I always write down all the little things that he says because they're so great. One of the things he said to me one time was, "It's big because we say it's big." Which is another way of saying perception is reality. Yeah, well, people perceive you to be on the cutting edge of keeping on, you know, on top of this stuff, you know, not unlike what you do. Then sometimes people come to you and go, you know, I need some help with this, you know, I'd like to hire you. So long story short, it's really helped Jeff and I to grow our business. But anybody who tells you that they have this new music business down is lying because it's changed while you and I have had this conversation. And as you know from all of the things that you write and you post, it's evolving and changing and it's so exciting. But that's the great thing is it's, it's very fluid.

Last question, Jay. What's the best piece of business advice that maybe you learned along the way or someone imparted to you?

Wow. That's, That's such a great question. I used to work for this guy named Bob Schnieders at Universal. He was my mentor, my idol. I mean, I just absolutely adored this man. There's simple things that he taught me. One is it doesn't cost anything to be nice. There's no reason to be an asshole. There's no reason to be toxic. And that's one of the great things about having your own company. Is you can now choose not to work with toxic people. And so, you know, that was one thing. It doesn't cost anything to be nice. And one of the other things that has always kind of stayed with me is, you know, my partner Jeff Mosko, he worked with Berry Gordy for a while. And, you know, we're big Motown backers. And one of the things that Barry Gordy stressed with his artists is that if you're on time, you're late. They called it Motown time. And so, Jeff and I have adopted that. And when we go to meetings or we have calls or we're traveling, we're super early to everything. And it's just in our DNA. And I tell folks, we speak at USC and UCLA every quarter and we do other kinds of engagements with students and we tell them all the time, If you're serious about this, act like it. I mean, make sure you're early, make sure you're prepared, make sure you plan, those kinds of basic blocking and tackling. And like we talked about at the top of the show is it's not sexy to do all that basic blocking and tackling and prep and the fundamentals, but man, it pays dividends over and over again.

You can find out more about Jay at jgilbertconsulting.com. That's J Gilbert, G-I-L-B-E-R-T Consulting, all one word, jgilbertconsulting.com. You can also find out about Label Logic at label-logic.net. That's label-logic.net. Thanks for listening and being in my inner circle. Remember, if you have any questions or comments, you can send them to questions@bobbyoinnercircle.com. To listen to other episodes of Bobby Osinski's Inner Circle, Go to bobbyosinski.com and select the podcast tab, or go to bobbyoinnercircle.com, or find it on iTunes, Stitcher, Mixcloud, Google Play, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Deezer, TuneIn Radio, Radio Public, and Podbean. At bobbyosinski.com and bobbyoinnercircle.com, you'll also find a signup form for my newsletter and for alerts for new podcasts. This is Bobby Osinski. I will see you next time.

Mellow-corduroy.