00:00:00: Hey there, my name's Usheen Loney and welcome to Audio Talks presented to you by Harman.

00:00:05: Now this is the podcast where music technology and culture collide and today we are diving deep into the DNA of modern music with one of the true architects of our digital evolution.

00:00:18: Yesterday is Ted Cohen, known across the industry as the godfather of digital music.

00:00:24: Now Ted's journey reads like a living history of the modern music business.

00:00:28: From his early days on tour with bands like The Who, Fleetwood Mac and Van Halen, to name but three, to his pivotal role as Senior Vice President of Digital Development at EMI Music.

00:00:39: Ted has spent decades at the front lines of digital transformation.

00:00:44: So plug in, turn the volume all the way up to eleven and join us for a masterclass on how music met technology with the one and only Ted Cohen.

00:00:52: Welcome sir, great to see you.

00:00:54: It's great to see, it's great to be here.

00:00:56: We've spent time bumping elbows in bars in various countries, and this is probably a much better audio.

00:01:04: Fantastic.

00:01:05: Listen, let's dive right in.

00:01:06: Let's go to your early days.

00:01:08: You were in the world of artist relations.

00:01:10: You were bumping elbows with some very awesome bands at the very early days.

00:01:15: And you began in the industry behind the counter at a retail chain, I believe.

00:01:20: Well, that was my first real job, but in high school, In nineteen sixty five, my parents had become friends with a guy who was the like local like Graham Norton.

00:01:32: So it was a show called the Mike Douglas show.

00:01:35: Yeah.

00:01:35: Our families became friends and his assistant called my mom one day.

00:01:39: I'm probably in eighth or ninth grade.

00:01:43: And she said, Mike asked me to call to see if Ted wants to come down to the show tomorrow.

00:01:48: We have this band that's flying directly into Cleveland from England before they go to New York.

00:01:54: to do the Ed Sullivan show, they're called the Rolling Stones.

00:01:57: Asked Ted if he's heard of them.

00:02:00: So this is before answering machines, voicemail, whatever.

00:02:04: Had my mother not answered that call, I might not be sitting here right now.

00:02:09: I ended up going down to the KYW TV and I'm backstage in the TV studio with the band and I've brought my Rolling Stones album with me.

00:02:22: And I'm standing there with a pen.

00:02:24: I think this was before Sharpies.

00:02:26: I'm standing there with just like a, you know, a ballpoint pen.

00:02:30: And I'm asking Mick to sign my album.

00:02:33: And he's ignoring me.

00:02:35: And the first words I ever heard from a Rolling Stone was Keith Richards turning to Mick Stang.

00:02:40: Stop being a f***ing asshole.

00:02:41: Sign his album.

00:02:44: So years later, when I'm at EMI, which we'll talk about later, I ended up going to downtown LA.

00:02:53: Mick was filming a video on Broadway for his solo album.

00:02:59: And he said, nice to meet you.

00:03:00: And I said, no, I met you when I was fourteen years old and you wouldn't sign my album.

00:03:04: He goes, yeah, I was a bit of a prick back then.

00:03:07: And it all went around.

00:03:10: But I ended up managing bands in high school.

00:03:14: One of the artists I managed was a guy named Eric Carman, who had a song called All By Myself, which Everybody, when you hear it go, I know that one.

00:03:24: I joke that Eric was a local primadonna in high school.

00:03:27: He became a global primadonna later when Clive Davis signed him.

00:03:31: He had the raspberries, which was one of the great power pop bands of all time.

00:03:36: But I managed him in high school and I managed a couple other bands where members went on to do some interesting things.

00:03:42: My career has been counting high school over fifty-some years.

00:03:47: And people say, you know, what's the best deal you've ever done?

00:03:51: And I went, oh, that's easy in high school.

00:03:53: Principal, the vice principal, Mr.

00:03:55: North calls me in, and he says, we want to book your band, The Disciples, for the spring dance.

00:04:01: I said, okay, there are a thousand dollars.

00:04:05: He said, well, the budget's eight hundred.

00:04:08: And I said, there are a thousand dollars.

00:04:12: And he goes, yeah, but the budget's eight hundred, and I see on your record here, you have some merits and detentions.

00:04:19: that you haven't gotten off your record, I can clear your record if we can get the band for eight hundred.

00:04:26: I had to go back and tell the band I could only get the maze hundred, but I ended up graduating with a clean record.

00:04:34: Anyway, I went off to school in pre-med in Ithaca, New York, at Ithaca College, which is across the hills from Cornell University.

00:04:42: And the first week I'm there, I don't joke, I talk about my life as a bunch of zealig events, and serendipitous events.

00:04:51: I'm walking across campus and I'm in front of the student union and I still don't know who it was because, again, I owe my being here to that person.

00:04:59: Guy stops me and he says, are you going to go see Rod Serling tonight?

00:05:03: And I said, Rod Serling from Twilight Zone?

00:05:07: He said, yeah.

00:05:08: I said, what are you talking about?

00:05:09: He said, well, he teaches here.

00:05:11: And I went, OK.

00:05:13: He was in the gymnasium giving his fall talk on the art of writing for television for film.

00:05:19: And he showed an episode of Twilight Zone.

00:05:22: And I went to the dean of the communication school the next day and said, my mother wants a doctor.

00:05:27: Wasn't my idea.

00:05:28: I was good in biology and chemistry in high school.

00:05:31: But my love was music.

00:05:34: And I said, can I switch majors?

00:05:37: And I told him about working, managing bands.

00:05:40: And I ended up working in the radio station that was part of the TV station.

00:05:44: where the Mike Douglas show was shot every day.

00:05:48: He said, okay, you can switch majors.

00:05:51: So I switched majors and started working for a club in Ithaca called the warehouse.

00:05:58: And I got hired to go out to some of these clubs in the other cities to hear bands that wanted to play this place, the warehouse.

00:06:07: And This was before cassettes.

00:06:10: There was a reel-to-reel.

00:06:11: Cassettes were just coming out.

00:06:13: So there were no band demo tapes.

00:06:16: So you had to go see them.

00:06:17: So I would go out on the weekends, and it was like Animal House.

00:06:20: I mean, I did.

00:06:22: In crazy clubs in Elmira, New York, in Binghamton, in Rochester, in Syracuse.

00:06:28: And I did that through school while I was majoring.

00:06:32: My sophomore year, the professor said to me, you're coasting.

00:06:37: And I need to teach you a lesson.

00:06:39: And if I give you a D in advertising, you have to go home for a semester.

00:06:44: I'm gonna give you a D. I go home in shame.

00:06:49: My parents are like, you know, what did you do?

00:06:52: We spent all this money, you're embarrassing us.

00:06:55: You know, what do we tell the neighbors?

00:06:58: Anyway, a week later, I go to a place called John Carroll University in Cleveland.

00:07:04: It's a Jesuit college.

00:07:07: And basically, everyone who graduated from there was either a priest or a lawyer.

00:07:12: I'm a nice Jewish boy from Shaker Heights, Ohio.

00:07:15: I end up talking my way into John Carroll University.

00:07:18: A week later, I'm running the college radio station.

00:07:22: I'm the music director.

00:07:23: There's another guy, Mike Delfonso, who was the program director.

00:07:28: And he and I turned the station from the Jesuit hour and the lessons you could learn from the Bible.

00:07:36: into a rock station.

00:07:37: This is now in nineteen sixty.

00:07:38: nine.

00:07:40: Crosby stills.

00:07:41: an ash album comes out.

00:07:42: Bread comes out.

00:07:44: Joni Mitchell, I don't forget which album comes out.

00:07:47: James Taylor, Sweet Baby James, T for the Tillerman, Kat Stevens, all coming out this year, nine seventy.

00:07:54: I'm working in the radio station.

00:07:56: My parents say to me, you're doing it again.

00:07:59: You're going to screw this up.

00:08:01: Quit the radio station.

00:08:03: Concentrate on your studies.

00:08:05: or we're going to kick you out of the house.

00:08:07: I went, I'll make it easy for you.

00:08:09: Bye.

00:08:11: The radio station was on the second floor in the bell tower of the main building of the campus.

00:08:18: I ended up living in the fourth floor in an empty room right under the bells.

00:08:22: The bells were on the fifth floor.

00:08:24: Yeah, I had to be out of bed by eight o'clock or it'd be like to, you know, hunch back another day.

00:08:31: We ended up getting serendipitously.

00:08:34: The radio station was WUJC.

00:08:36: Through a series again of serendipitous moments, we ended up being the only rock station in Cleveland.

00:08:42: Both of the other rock stations went off the air.

00:08:46: And so all of a sudden we're getting calls from Columbia Records and from Warner Brothers and from Phillips Records at the time.

00:08:54: Can we bring artists by to do an interview?

00:08:57: So Blood Sweat & Tears came by, Johnny Winter came by, Tom Rush, folk singer.

00:09:03: I start meeting the promo people and then I get introduced to a guy named Billy Bass.

00:09:08: Billy Bass was a DJ on Wixie Radio and I meet him.

00:09:14: He starts introducing me to people.

00:09:17: His roommate, Lynn Doyle, a guy named Lynn, was the buyer at the store Disc Records that you talk about.

00:09:23: I started out in retail.

00:09:25: I'm now getting in trouble with the school for turning this.

00:09:28: we ended up in the Sunday paper a full page story of this college radio station that was rocking Cleveland and they shut the station down and made it put it back to being an hour on the sermon on the mount whatever.

00:09:44: I stopped going to class and I get a call from Lynn saying we need a fire.

00:09:48: once you come in and you'll work with me and we'll run buying.

00:09:52: I'm all of a sudden the co-buyer for thirty four stores around the country and I've never worked in a record store in my life.

00:09:59: So we had a store on the west side and I called up.

00:10:04: the manager's name was Mike Gee and I would talk to Mike every week.

00:10:08: but I called him up.

00:10:09: I said can I come in on Saturdays and clerk?

00:10:14: He said what do you mean?

00:10:15: I said I'm buying for thirty four stores across the country and I've never been behind the counter.

00:10:21: I want to see why people buy what they buy.

00:10:24: Why does it resonate?

00:10:25: I mean, I know why I love music, but you know, I want to experience consumer.

00:10:31: And he said, come in.

00:10:32: So every Saturday I would go to the store and I was working for free.

00:10:36: And I would pick an album.

00:10:38: And I lucked out because again, right around that time, sweet baby James had come out, T for the Tillerman, but also Elton John first album with your song on it.

00:10:49: and the first Emerson-Lake and Palmer album and an artist by the name of Emmett Rhodes, who I don't know if you're familiar with.

00:10:56: I just love, I mean, Emmett Rhodes was one of the, if you haven't heard Emmett Rhodes folks, you know, go on Spotify or Apple or Amazon or Tidal or Cobuz and listen to Emmett Rhodes.

00:11:08: He was just wonderful.

00:11:09: He passed away a couple of years ago.

00:11:10: I would pick an album and if you came in, happened to come into the store that Saturday, I would ask you what you liked.

00:11:19: And I'd say, have you heard Emmett Rhodes?

00:11:23: And you go, no.

00:11:25: I go, look, I'm only here on Saturdays.

00:11:27: Buy it.

00:11:28: Take it home.

00:11:29: Listen to it.

00:11:30: If you don't like it, come back next Saturday.

00:11:33: I will out of my pocket buy the record back from you.

00:11:37: And I'm starting, it basically was my own personal recommendation engine.

00:11:42: Anyway, I did that for about nine months and I ended up meeting during that time because again, we had thirty four stores.

00:11:48: I met.

00:11:49: Neil Bogart who went on to do cast.

00:11:51: he was at Buddha records at the time.

00:11:52: He went on to do cast the Blanker records.

00:11:56: I met a guy named Ron Goldstein who was at Warner who introduced me to this new artist Rai Kooter because we were a very important chain.

00:12:03: I didn't get a pair of tickets for a show.

00:12:05: I would get ten pair of tickets to bring my friends.

00:12:09: I mean it was it was an amazing time.

00:12:11: You know and again I wouldn't get a the new albums, I would get a box.

00:12:17: Here's the new Santana of Braxess album.

00:12:20: Give them to some of your friends.

00:12:22: I ended up meeting Frank DeLeo, who went on to manage Michael Jackson.

00:12:27: I met Steve Popovich and they adopted me, which kind of changed the rest.

00:12:34: I got adopted by Billy Bass, who introduced me to Lynn.

00:12:38: And then through that, I met Popovich and Frank DeLeo and a guy named Marty Mooney at Columbia Records.

00:12:44: and the folks at Warner, Warner was just emerging as Columbia was the gold star job.

00:12:51: But Warner became the gold star job later.

00:12:55: I get a call from Steve Popovich one day, go down to Cincinnati, interview for the local promo job.

00:13:02: When I was with Columbia, I discovered that my love of live music continued.

00:13:08: I ended up cut what we would call covering a date.

00:13:11: Covering a date meant going to the show.

00:13:14: You know, hi, I'm Ted from Columbia Records.

00:13:16: How are you?

00:13:17: Good to see you, Blood Sweat and Tears, Chicago, Bosgags.

00:13:22: Ended up working with Tom Rush.

00:13:25: Having met Blood Sweat and Tears and Tom Rush in the college radio station, I'm now quote, covering their shows.

00:13:32: I discovered that I liked that a lot better than going to radio stations going, please play our new record.

00:13:38: Please, please play this.

00:13:40: I go to Warner and This is now in nineteen seventy three and Alice Cooper comes to Cincinnati and It's the billion-dollar babies tour.

00:13:53: I'd already met him on the killer album But now he's in town for billion-dollar babies and his manager chef Gordon who is legendary Says to me once you come with us get on the plane.

00:14:07: So I end up calling my boss in Cleveland to say, hi, I'm in St.

00:14:11: Louis.

00:14:12: And what are you doing in St.

00:14:13: Louis?

00:14:13: That's not your territory.

00:14:16: And I said, well, Chef said, get on the plane.

00:14:19: So I started hanging out with the artists.

00:14:21: But talk

00:14:22: to us about how this kind of then segues into all those photographs that you share on social media.

00:14:29: And it's yourself with Fleetwood Mac in the early seventies.

00:14:32: It's yourself with the who and with Van Halen.

00:14:35: And like, how did you move from being in the retail to the relations side of things with some of the biggest bands in the world.

00:14:43: What happened was, so I'm doing local promotion.

00:14:48: I'm hanging out with bands.

00:14:49: I get invited by a guy named Bill Sherard, who had been program director at Wixie in Cleveland, had come to Cincinnati.

00:14:56: He was program director at WSAI.

00:14:58: We became much closer.

00:14:59: He then went to Atlanta and he calls me one day and he goes, I've got tickets for Led Zeppelin at Fulton County Stadium, which Luckily all these are gone, but this was these horrible like cereal bowl concrete stadiums that they built in the seventies.

00:15:16: They were horrible for football and they were horrible for baseball and they weren't great for concerts either.

00:15:22: But he invites me to come to Atlanta for the show and we get to the show.

00:15:25: now it's mid-summer of seventy three and We meet the regional Atlantic guy at the box office window on the concourse and he goes I got some really bad news.

00:15:37: Bill goes, what?

00:15:37: And he says, there's no tickets in the box office.

00:15:40: They're not here.

00:15:42: Now, again, this is, there are no cell phones.

00:15:44: There are no pagers.

00:15:46: I said, let me see what I can do.

00:15:49: Give me a couple of minutes.

00:15:50: I think maybe I can figure this out.

00:15:53: And about ten minutes later, I go up to this guy and he said, hi, look, my name's Ted Cohen.

00:15:57: I'm with Warner Brothers Records.

00:15:59: I'm here with Larry from Atlantic and we were at the box office and there's no tickets.

00:16:04: And he says, well, I've got them right here.

00:16:06: But how did you get on stage?

00:16:10: I had talked my way literally into the stadium, through security, up onto the field, up onto the stage, and I'm standing on the side of the stage.

00:16:19: And he says, I hope that you can start here.

00:16:20: But how did you get in?

00:16:23: There's a guy standing next to him.

00:16:25: And he says, hi, I'm Jerry.

00:16:28: Call me on Monday.

00:16:29: And he hands me his card.

00:16:30: And I look at his card and go, I'll call you on Monday.

00:16:34: The show is amazing.

00:16:36: I call him on Monday and I said, hi.

00:16:38: He says, I want to hire you.

00:16:41: I said, pardon?

00:16:42: He said, you walked through seventy thousand people.

00:16:46: I don't know how you did it, but I want to hire you to work for us.

00:16:50: It was Jerry Greenberg.

00:16:51: He was president of Atlantic Records.

00:16:54: He said, what do you want to do?

00:16:56: I said, I want to work with artists.

00:16:58: He said, what do you mean?

00:16:59: I said, well, I had been led to believe at Warner that I was moving into the newly created artist development department, but it hasn't happened.

00:17:08: He goes, fine, you'll do artist development.

00:17:11: He said, where do you want to live?

00:17:12: I said, I was born in Chicago.

00:17:14: I'd love to go back and work out of Chicago.

00:17:16: And it would be easy to get anywhere I needed to get from, you know, being central in the Midwest.

00:17:21: He goes, fine, you'll be in Chicago.

00:17:23: I get a call two days later from a guy named Eddie Rosenblatt, who had ended up at the end of his career, ran Gaffin records before he retired.

00:17:32: And Eddie calls and goes, what the?

00:17:34: Are you doing?

00:17:35: I said, what do you mean?

00:17:36: He goes, Jerry Greenberg called me and said he hired you.

00:17:38: He can't hire you.

00:17:40: He says he has to talk, you know, because I was Warner and he was Atlantic.

00:17:45: There was this thing you couldn't poach without.

00:17:48: He was supposed to call Eddie before I talked to him to say, you got this guy in Cincinnati.

00:17:53: I want to hire him.

00:17:55: I said, why are you doing this to me?

00:17:57: I said, well, I want to go into artist development.

00:17:59: He goes, fine, you'll go into artist development.

00:18:01: You'll get a call from Bob Regear tomorrow.

00:18:04: And I got a call from this guy, Barbara Guerre, the next day who changed my life and I went into artist development.

00:18:10: And I've always said that what we were doing was artist development.

00:18:14: It wasn't artist relations.

00:18:17: Artist relations is going backstage after the show and going, you guys are really great.

00:18:22: Do you want to go out to dinner?

00:18:23: Do you want to meet that girl that was in front of the stage?

00:18:26: Do you want to do something else bad?

00:18:29: My job was not to say you guys are great.

00:18:31: My job was to say, was good, you could be better.

00:18:36: The set isn't in the right order, or I sum up the beginning of my career of, in the case of David Lee Roth from Van Halen, you're talking too much, and as an expert in talking too much, I'm telling you, you're talking too much.

00:18:51: And in the case of David Byrne, when I ended up working with the Talking Heads, please say something.

00:18:56: Just say something other than, the name of the song is Life Be a Wartime, you know.

00:19:03: So my job was to work with baby bands and help them be better.

00:19:09: I was lucky enough.

00:19:11: the baby bands that I was assigned ended up being Van Halen Fleetwood Mac.

00:19:16: Well Fleetwood Mac was not a baby band, but they were continually in transition.

00:19:20: I ended up meeting Mick and everybody in seventy three when their manager Clifford Davis fired the band.

00:19:31: and created a new Fleetwood Mac that had no members of Fleetwood.

00:19:35: He had trademarked the name, stole the name.

00:19:42: And I got a call from Mick saying, hi, this is Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac.

00:19:45: There's a fake with Fleetwood Mac out there now.

00:19:48: If a promoter calls you and says they booked Fleetwood Mac, it's not us.

00:19:52: We're in court getting our name back.

00:19:54: This is seventy three now in seventy four.

00:19:56: I'm in artist development.

00:19:58: I'm assigned to Fleetwood Mac.

00:19:59: Bob Welch is the lead guitar player at the time.

00:20:03: Stevie and Lindsay hadn't joined the band yet.

00:20:05: And I basically, it was a station wagon tour.

00:20:08: All of these tours that the first tours I went out on Van Halen was a station wagon tour.

00:20:14: Talking Heads was a station wagon.

00:20:16: Two station wagons or one station wagon and equipment van.

00:20:20: And so Fleetwood Mac was playing like fifteen hundred seat theaters or, you know, eight hundred seat clubs.

00:20:28: And then Stevie and Lindsay joined the band.

00:20:32: Bob went off on his own solo, you know, the White Album came out in Rimmerson Tuscan.

00:20:36: It got bigger and bigger.

00:20:38: Because I was embedded with them, I could say things to them over the years.

00:20:44: that promo, you know, artist development, promo, whatever, label exec, would you say, you know, you're being jerks.

00:20:51: Stop it.

00:20:52: That's not you.

00:20:53: I know you better than that.

00:20:55: You've got a radio guy out here.

00:20:56: that was very nice to you at the beginning and you're saying you don't want to see him now.

00:21:00: I'm bringing him in and you're going to be very nice to him.

00:21:04: So that happened, you know, Van Halen, I was, you know, the first year.

00:21:07: I would say Bob Hilburn from the LA Times is out in the lobby.

00:21:11: Have him come in.

00:21:12: This is great.

00:21:13: The next year.

00:21:14: Hey, Bob Hilburn is here.

00:21:16: We met him last year.

00:21:17: Yes, and you'll meet him again this year.

00:21:20: So it was a combination of Giving them input on the show giving them input on keeping their head on straight and basically in the case of like Van Halen saying to a journalist in Chicago I know you're coming to see Journey and Ronnie Montrose tonight get there at seven thirty.

00:21:38: I'm on the road with this new band Van Halen.

00:21:40: You're gonna be able to say that you saw Van Halen You know opening for Journey.

00:21:45: Yeah Wow I did the first six years of Van Halen.

00:21:49: I did the first four years of Talking Heads.

00:21:52: I did ten years with Fleetwood Mac.

00:21:54: I would go from tour to tour to tour.

00:21:57: I was home maybe fifty or sixty days a year.

00:22:02: I literally was continually on the road.

00:22:04: My other baby artist was Prince.

00:22:08: And so Prince was playing four hundred seat, five hundred seat clubs on the Dirty Mind tour.

00:22:15: He is the one artist out of maybe the two hundred artists that I worked with over my career.

00:22:22: I had no suggestions.

00:22:24: Nothing other than holy, I mean it was like really.

00:22:31: But he was great and I watched it go from literally the Ritz in New York the Park West in Chicago The Agora in Atlanta the Rainbow Music Hall in Denver Flippers, which was a roller rink in LA.

00:22:46: anyway Prince played.

00:22:48: This roller rink was the last date of the dirty mine tour.

00:22:53: He then went to do those two dates opening for the stones at the Colosseum Where he got boot offs.

00:22:58: I don't know if you know the backstory.

00:23:00: he got boot off stage The first time in fifteen minutes the second day when we convinced Prince to come back and do it again.

00:23:07: The crowd knew that the crowd the day before had gotten him off stage in fifteen minutes.

00:23:11: We're going to get him off stage in thirteen minutes.

00:23:15: But, you know, Nick loved him.

00:23:17: So I got to work with Prince.

00:23:19: And then I was also good at, I think I was good at working with big artists.

00:23:24: I was assigned to work with the who.

00:23:26: Pete Townsend hadn't been to a radio station in twenty years.

00:23:31: And I got Roger to go.

00:23:32: I got Pete to go.

00:23:33: I got John Edwistle.

00:23:34: Kenny was great.

00:23:35: I'm still friends with Pete today.

00:23:37: Everybody that I worked with, there was a certain bond there.

00:23:40: So I did artist development.

00:23:42: In the middle of that, I'm in Chicago for the electronic show.

00:23:47: There was a company called Advent that made speakers, but they also made this big screen TV.

00:23:54: And the first projection TV.

00:23:58: And they moved me to Boston.

00:24:00: I was based in Boston at the beginning.

00:24:02: The guy who owned the company who had bought the company was a guy named Peter Sprague.

00:24:06: And Peter was the son of the guy who created National Semiconductor, which was Intel before Intel.

00:24:16: Intel is the brand that everybody knows.

00:24:18: National Semiconductor and Fairchild were the two companies that Silicon Valley was formed around.

00:24:26: Intel came later.

00:24:27: Anyway, Peter invites me to come to Chicago with him for the CES consumer electronic show.

00:24:34: I said, what's that?

00:24:35: He goes, you're going to love it.

00:24:37: And I get there.

00:24:38: and it's gear.

00:24:41: It's just stuff.

00:24:43: And we're in our own Atari.

00:24:46: And I had started to hang out with the Atari people.

00:24:49: I started to get into what video games and how the personal computer were going to be.

00:24:55: Anyway, again, through serendipity and Zellig moment, I'm in the Advent Suite at the Great Hotel on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

00:25:07: And these two homeless-looking guys walk in, and they have a brown zipper case, and they unzip it, and they go, this is the Apple One computer.

00:25:16: It's going to change the world.

00:25:19: And it was Jobzomozniak.

00:25:22: And I meet them, and they start talking about the impact of the personal computer.

00:25:28: And I end up calling up my friend at Atari and said, can I come up to Cupertino and hang out?

00:25:33: I ended up becoming the liaison between the Warner Music Group and Atari.

00:25:38: The

00:25:38: fact that you are so early with so many things that totally changed the industry I think is really informative.

00:25:44: Everything kind of feeds into everything else and you're kind of talking about how the music industry moved from record and album, play big venues, do big tours, kind of cycle of recording and touring and you spoke about it moving into something much more fluid.

00:25:58: So I'm wondering when you started to see this shift in the business and did this kind of lead into some further adventures in technology, which you've already hinted at there.

00:26:09: Right.

00:26:09: Well, I think it started really with Prince.

00:26:13: And you know, there's a lot of like rewrite of history.

00:26:16: and Prince talked about he was a slave at Warner.

00:26:20: Prince didn't leave Warner.

00:26:23: Prince was so prolific.

00:26:25: that during Dirty Mind we had built a studio for him in his house because it was cheaper than paying studio bills.

00:26:34: I remember the first time I met him was at Russ Thyret's house.

00:26:38: Russ was head of promotion at Warner and head of marketing.

00:26:43: He was like number three at Warner.

00:26:44: It was Mo Austin and Lenny Warrinker running, you know, they were the heads of the company.

00:26:50: Then Eddie Rosenblatt sales and Russ, I read marketing and promotion and I was invited over to meet Prince and He was just sitting on the couch.

00:27:01: It was like this little.

00:27:02: I mean he was literally just sitting there and we started talking and I went to Minneapolis to see him at First Avenue Do a show and I came back and I said I want to do this tour.

00:27:14: Prince was incredibly prolific.

00:27:16: So he would write a song on Monday recorded on Tuesday and he wanted it released on Wednesday.

00:27:23: The traditional record the album in January, get it ready for release in April and then go out on tour in June and then come back in November and start writing the next record.

00:27:38: That wasn't for him.

00:27:40: He felt that music that he was creating would get stale in the can.

00:27:46: Basically, if he recorded it in April and it didn't come out until September, he had moved on creatively.

00:27:54: Similarly, Todd Rungren was like this, where Todd was continually recording.

00:28:00: And so the idea that you had to follow this, record it in January, put it out in April, tour in June, and then start all over again in November, December was antithetical to the potential fluid creative process.

00:28:16: So Prince wanted to release stuff when he wanted to release it.

00:28:21: The other thing, jumping to the present, that, you know, the delivery of the music is not defined by the format, by the folder.

00:28:30: So a certain amount of music fit on a forty-five, a certain amount of music fit on a thirty-three.

00:28:35: When we got to digital, it's no longer what will fit on a cassette, what will fit on a CD, what will fit on vinyl.

00:28:43: You could say, I want to release two tracks, I want to release one track, I want to release a thirty track.

00:28:49: You know journey we talk about artists like Billie Eilish who I'm just completely mesmerized by in terms of.

00:28:59: There's this thing of well.

00:29:00: She recorded the records in her bedroom in her and Phineas's house.

00:29:05: Yes, but no I mean there's.

00:29:08: there's the homespun thing of sitting on the bed and coming up with ideas.

00:29:13: And then if there's a segment on Sixty Minutes over here that shows Phineas going through one song of what they did and there's sixty or seventy tracks and it jumps from this part of the vocal to this part of the vocal, whatever.

00:29:28: So it's a combination of organic and the technology that provides the creative tools.

00:29:35: I saw her do an interview recently about writing the song for Barbie.

00:29:42: Yes.

00:29:42: And they recorded the demo on a phone.

00:29:46: They just kind of sung it along into a voicemail.

00:29:51: And on the other end, I can't remember who the music supervisor was for the Barbie movie.

00:29:56: They went, yeah.

00:29:59: And the song came together in an hour.

00:30:03: The recording of the song took weeks till she felt it was ready.

00:30:09: So there's the organic side of it and there's the technology side of it.

00:30:13: And when they work together, you have magic.

00:30:18: Elliot Shiner was Steely Dan's engineer and in some cases co-producer on Goucho and on the seminal albums that he and Gary Katz worked on.

00:30:31: And I was interviewing Elliot at a conference in New York called Mondo about four years ago.

00:30:36: And I had met Elliot when we worked on DVD audio.

00:30:39: I said to Elliot when I'm doing this interview about, you know, getting it right.

00:30:44: I said, I'm really excited now that we have digital.

00:30:48: You couldn't fit twenty versions of Hay-Nineteen on a CD.

00:30:55: But now we could have the twenty different versions that led to the final version.

00:31:01: And we could hear the guitar parts or the keyboard solos or whatever that weren't used and, you know, show me the creative path to how we got to magic.

00:31:14: He said, you'll never hear those.

00:31:15: He said, what do you mean?

00:31:16: He said, the mindset of Walter and Donald were both, you know, Walter was alive then.

00:31:24: They want you to hear what they wanted you to hear, which was the finished version.

00:31:29: On the other hand, you know, he had another Beatles album that's just coming out that has ten different versions of.

00:31:36: I mean, it's great to hear how a song starts with a guitar and a vocal or a piano and a vocal or acapella and where it ends up.

00:31:46: We have all these tools.

00:31:49: You know, at every inflection point, somebody's complaining that there are now tools that they didn't have access to.

00:31:57: We'll embrace them.

00:31:58: Try it, play with it.

00:31:59: You might actually find that you like it.

00:32:01: And Ted, in the early two thousands, you served as the vice president of digital over at EMI Music.

00:32:07: Can you talk to us a bit about, you know, your mindset going into the role, how the role evolved and what brought you there?

00:32:15: You know, when I got hired by EMI to, and I didn't know I was getting hired.

00:32:21: So what happened was, you know, I was at Warner, I went with Robert Fripp and Tony Levin.

00:32:26: Like in April of nineteen eighty-four.

00:32:28: I went to see this movie with them.

00:32:30: They called me up.

00:32:31: We just I Had just finished being out on the discipline tour with them.

00:32:36: We ended up in LA.

00:32:38: They called me on a Sunday afternoon.

00:32:40: They said we're going to go see this movie tonight.

00:32:42: It's supposed to be very funny.

00:32:43: It's called spinal tap and so we go to the Beverly Center and I go see spinal tap and for the first half hour I'm laughing my head off the second half hour.

00:32:54: I'm sitting there kind of Where does he get these stories?

00:32:57: I know that.

00:32:58: I know that incident.

00:33:00: I realized that a friend of mine Derek Sutton had been hired by Rob Reiner and Christopher and Harry and everybody to collect stories of what was the worst disaster that happened to you on your.

00:33:12: Every segment in that movie is based on a real, you know train wreck.

00:33:16: that happened to somebody and I'm watching the movie.

00:33:20: by the end of the movie I went.

00:33:23: I don't think I want to do this anymore Because I realized that I was Artie Fuffkin, that I was Paul Shaper.

00:33:29: I had had an in-store with a band called Berlin, which I have a picture of here somewhere.

00:33:36: Yeah, remember the well.

00:33:37: And nobody showed up for the in-store.

00:33:39: It was at four o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon in Providence, Rhode Island.

00:33:43: No one showed up.

00:33:44: We're sitting in the store, again, with the Sharpies and the posters and everything and crickets.

00:33:50: I go to a cash machine down the block.

00:33:54: I take two hundred dollars out and I'm standing away from the front of the store and if you happen to walk by I'd say hi I know it's gonna sound crazy.

00:34:03: here's ten bucks.

00:34:04: go inside.

00:34:05: the band Berlin is in there.

00:34:07: buy the album.

00:34:08: it's yours.

00:34:09: keep the.

00:34:09: you know it's yours.

00:34:10: have them sign it and tell them how much you like the band because Terry Nunn is sitting there nobody likes us nobody cares about.

00:34:17: it's like the scene in Spinal Tap where they're in the store and you know our.

00:34:21: and paul shaver is saying kick me this is all my fault.

00:34:26: so you know i end up going up going from there.

00:34:30: uh i had been offered a job by westwood one.

00:34:33: so from the next morning i'm after the movie i went into mo austin's office and said i don't want to be on the road anymore for at least for a while.

00:34:40: i've got to get off the road because i may kill an artist and if i kill an artist it will help the catalog but i'll be in jail.

00:34:48: so i said to mo move me to promotion move me to Marketing moved me to what creative services.

00:34:55: I just need a break.

00:34:56: and he says, no, you're the best at this and we need you.

00:35:00: And I said, okay, then I resigned.

00:35:01: and I resigned.

00:35:02: and I went to Westwood one for a year.

00:35:04: I had dealt with Westwood one on them wanting to record some of our artists for live radio shows.

00:35:10: I also oversaw a thing called the Warner Brothers music show.

00:35:14: which was a monthly series of live from the Orpheum in Boston, Robert Palmer, live from the Roxy and LA, Van Morrison, Dyer Straits, Talking Heads, Pretenders, Climax Blues Band.

00:35:29: I was overseeing this monthly program that we did.

00:35:32: that we sent out on vinyl.

00:35:34: I was dealing with King Biscuit and Westwood One and BBC Rock Hour and ABC and NBC Radio.

00:35:42: So I got hired by Westwood One.

00:35:44: I did that for a year.

00:35:45: I went to work for a guy named Sandy Gallin.

00:35:47: Sandy is the archetype Hollywood manager.

00:35:50: He managed Dolly Parton, Neil Diamond, The Pointer Sisters, Donnie Osmond, Whippy Goldberg, Paul Schaefer.

00:35:59: It was very funny.

00:36:00: I quit because I was already fucking Paul Schaefer.

00:36:02: Now I'm working with Paul Schaefer, explaining to them that I'm the real Arty Fuffkin.

00:36:09: So I worked for Sandy.

00:36:10: Sandy taught me the difference and this is really important.

00:36:13: If you called me in nineteen eighty-four, eighty-three before I went to work for Sandy in eighty-five, if you called me by the end of the day, I would call you back.

00:36:24: It may be at six o'clock and you don't answer your phone.

00:36:27: There is no, again, no cell phones yet.

00:36:30: There's no voicemail.

00:36:31: You might have an answering service.

00:36:33: We're so high oceans line.

00:36:35: Can I help you?

00:36:36: Hi, would you tell him I called him back?

00:36:38: Click buy, okay?

00:36:42: I thought I was doing really good because you called me and I returned your call and even if I didn't get a hold of you, balls in your court, I called you back.

00:36:49: I go to work for Sandy and he asked me one day, did you get a hold of Oishin?

00:36:56: I went, yeah, I left him a message.

00:36:59: He goes, I didn't ask you if you left him a message.

00:37:01: I asked you, did you get a hold of him?

00:37:04: Did he sign the deal?

00:37:05: Did you get the check?

00:37:07: Did you get the check to the bank?

00:37:09: Is the money in my account?

00:37:11: Was the check good?

00:37:13: Unless you did all this, you haven't done shit.

00:37:17: Get the out of my office.

00:37:19: And I'm like, okay.

00:37:21: So it was not covering your butt.

00:37:25: It was getting it done.

00:37:28: And I was only there for nine months.

00:37:30: And I finally gave birth to myself and I left.

00:37:33: But I learned the difference about what had to be done.

00:37:37: We're managing Barbara Streisand.

00:37:39: She put out the Broadway album, which was her doing all these classic Broadway songs.

00:37:44: And he said, what do you know about paper review broadcasts?

00:37:47: Barbara wants to do a worldwide, you know, paper to you.

00:37:52: A guy named Kevin Wall, who has been around for a very long time, a really great guy, had just done the Prince's Trust concerts.

00:38:03: His office was across the street, above Tower Records.

00:38:06: on Sunset.

00:38:07: Sandy says, what do you know?

00:38:08: I said, let me check.

00:38:09: I'll get back to you in a few.

00:38:11: I go over to Kevin's office.

00:38:12: I said, you just did the Prince's Trust.

00:38:15: What information do you have?

00:38:16: He has me a thing that was the size of what we used to call the Yellow Pages, a phone book.

00:38:21: Remember what phone books were?

00:38:22: We said phone books.

00:38:24: They were really thick.

00:38:27: He gives me this book.

00:38:28: It's every cable system, every satellite.

00:38:31: It's everything in the world that can do pay per view.

00:38:35: I come into Sandy's office, I put it on his desk.

00:38:39: I'm standing there.

00:38:41: He goes, would you like me to stand up and applaud?

00:38:44: Get out of my office.

00:38:47: So it was about getting it done.

00:38:48: So that was one lesson.

00:38:50: You know, I learned about the production at a high level after doing it.

00:38:55: Warner at Westwood one, I picked up what goes into doing a really high quality live recording.

00:39:01: I got involved in a label that had started up called Cypress.

00:39:04: and got involved in how do you work as a distributed label inside of a big label?

00:39:11: So we were distributed by Polygram and it was what's the distributed labels responsibility?

00:39:17: What's the distributors responsibility?

00:39:19: So on the way, in all these various roles, I ended up picking up usable knowledge that I believe made me a better functioning piece of the puzzle.

00:39:32: I ended up leaving Westwood one going to work for Sandy.

00:39:35: I ended up getting serendipitously.

00:39:37: Phillips had started Phillips Media, CDI.

00:39:41: Oh, yes.

00:39:41: Yeah.

00:39:42: And a guy named Mark Fine, whose father was David Fine, who ran Polygram globally at that point for Jan Timmer, who was head of Phillips.

00:39:51: Yeah.

00:39:51: He ended up meeting the guy I was working with.

00:39:54: We had bought a Sony twenty four track digital machine.

00:39:58: He wanted to use it.

00:40:00: to do an experiment with a thing called elastic music, where you would jump to different tracks and have maybe different kinds of drums and different kinds of percussion.

00:40:09: And basically, on the fly, create different mixes.

00:40:13: And I started getting involved with them.

00:40:15: I ended up working in Phillips on CD-ROM.

00:40:17: We did CDI.

00:40:19: I produced a title for the Cranberries.

00:40:22: I worked on the Santana project, worked on Horde Festival, Dave Matthews and Cheryl Crowe and the Black Crows.

00:40:28: worked on Soundgarden and started working on what an interactive title would be.

00:40:33: On the Cranberries, the idea was to create basically a CD-ROM that explained who the Cranberries were and how they came about.

00:40:42: By the time we finished it, they had sold thirteen million records.

00:40:46: And it was more like, here's the background on where the Cranberries came from.

00:40:49: It wasn't introducing the Cranberries, it was a peek behind the curtain.

00:40:54: It ended up selling a quarter of a million.

00:40:56: It did really well.

00:40:57: I have a tendency to break rules.

00:41:00: I realized that CDI wasn't happening.

00:41:03: We all realized CDI wasn't happening.

00:41:05: We started doing Mac versions and PC versions.

00:41:10: I went down to engineering and said, is there a way that we could do a single disc that would play on a CDI player, that would also play on a PC, that would also play on a Mac, that I could also play the audio files on a CDI audio player?

00:41:25: And they said, let's play with it.

00:41:27: and they came back a few a few weeks later and we had created what was called a rainbow disc a rainbow.

00:41:35: it was called a rainbow disc because cds were called red book audio.

00:41:41: the actual binder from philips and sony was a red book.

00:41:46: so you had red book audio.

00:41:48: you had white book mpeg video.

00:41:51: you had yellow book photo cd.

00:41:53: you had green book cdi This disc, if you put it in a PC, it played.

00:41:59: If you put it in a Mac, it played.

00:42:01: If you put it in a PC, it played a Windows media file of the videos.

00:42:07: If you put it in a Mac, it played QuickTime versions.

00:42:10: It basically would sniff what it was in, and it would play the appropriate correct files.

00:42:16: Anyway, because it was a single format, it wasn't like Betamax and VHS.

00:42:22: It wasn't crippled by format wars.

00:42:26: So we did that anyway which was an amazing technology company and the worst marketing company on the planet.

00:42:35: I Ended up years later in two thousand five.

00:42:37: I did.

00:42:38: I went to in the city and management Tony Wilson interviewed me and he had come to me in LA someone.

00:42:46: I got a cold call.

00:42:47: Hi.

00:42:47: I'm Tony Wilson.

00:42:48: I'm like hi And he came over.

00:42:50: he said tell me about your time in Phillips.

00:42:53: I said If the world governments had wanted to get rid of the cocaine problem, all they had to do was put Phillips in charge of marketing cocaine.

00:43:03: Because Phillips would tell you, it's really great, it burns your nose, it drains your bank account, and you end up beating up your dog.

00:43:10: Those would be the selling points for cocaine.

00:43:14: So he ended up, there were posters that in the city said, come here, Ted Cohen speak, and explain how Phillips could cure the world's drug problems.

00:43:22: That's funny.

00:43:23: Anyway, we get shut down and I end up getting hired by over the next two years.

00:43:32: We got shut down in January first, nineteen ninety seven.

00:43:35: I ended up working with Prodigy Music Service, Liquid Audio, Rio Port, the original Napster.

00:43:46: I was giving a talk in November of nineteen ninety eight at the Beverly Hilton.

00:43:51: And I come off stage and a woman walks up to me and she says, hi, my name is Jennifer Cast.

00:43:56: I'm general manager at amazon.com.

00:43:59: Have you heard of us?

00:44:01: I said, yes, my wife orders a lot of books from you.

00:44:03: I end up paying for them.

00:44:05: She thinks she's getting gifts in the mail.

00:44:08: She said, well, we're going into music.

00:44:09: It's going to be our second vertical and you're going to be our music consultant.

00:44:14: And I went, why?

00:44:16: And she said, everything you just said in your opening remarks here at the conference is what I've been saying to Jeff Bezos for the past, you know, six months.

00:44:25: So I ended up getting hired by Amazon.

00:44:27: I spent a year, well, almost a year, maybe eight months helping them get the service together.

00:44:34: Had to go around to the labels and beg them to sell to Amazon because at the time selling to Amazon would piss off Sam Goody and Tower Records.

00:44:44: Okay.

00:44:45: Yeah.

00:44:46: A few years later, selling downloads to Apple would piss off Amazon.

00:44:52: A couple of years later, licensing Spotify would piss off Apple.

00:44:56: At every point, somebody was like, well, why are you doing that?

00:45:01: But it's this continuous evolution.

00:45:03: Anyway, I worked with Amazon.

00:45:05: One of the things I came up with was a thing called Essentials, which Amazon used across other verticals later.

00:45:13: They said, we want to do a thing, we want to do a section on Grammy award-winning music.

00:45:19: I said, nobody cares.

00:45:21: Other than album of the year or artist of the year, nobody wants to know about the best engineered polka recording, okay?

00:45:30: But what would help?

00:45:32: I know rock, I think I do, but I don't know classical.

00:45:36: I don't know jazz.

00:45:38: If I go on to Amazon Music, What are the first five jazz albums?

00:45:43: if I was just gonna order own five jazz recordings?

00:45:48: Is it Miles Davis kind of blue?

00:45:50: Is it Charlie Park?

00:45:51: You know, what are the five albums?

00:45:53: I should own and then if I come back to you and say I really liked kind of blue Miles Davis What are the next five?

00:46:02: Things that basically be that purple haired clerk in Tower Records on Sunset that knew everything about Stevie Ray Vaughan.

00:46:12: Be that guidepost.

00:46:13: and so they ended up creating Essentials and they did that across, they added it to books, they added it to other verticals.

00:46:20: At the same time I was working with them, I'm working for the RIAA and I'm working for Napster and it was like working for whatever the feuding families were in Ireland and I'm carrying messages back and forth, you know, about how do we work this out.

00:46:36: It became obvious that Napster didn't really want to play nice.

00:46:40: They thought if they went to the Supreme Court and said that file sharing was like me loaning you a book, but it wasn't, that they would win and they wouldn't have to pay anybody anything.

00:46:50: And it was only when they lost at the Supreme Court that they then said, okay, let's make a deal.

00:46:56: I got hired by a guy named Jay Samet who was working at Universal Studios to work on a thing called Animal House.

00:47:03: He had set up a website called animalhouse.com.

00:47:07: And it was a really stupid idea because the idea was we create this sort of online campus experience where you would have Animal House, Harvard, Animal House, Stanford, Animal House, Ohio State, and you would communicate with your friends.

00:47:23: It was literally the idea became Facebook.

00:47:27: They didn't steal it.

00:47:28: I mean, Mark, whoever it was, the Winklevoss twins or whatever.

00:47:33: and Zuckerberg came up with Facebook, but the idea of a place where you could interact with people on your campus, whatever, I was hired to do the first digital battle of the bands online where you would submit an MP three of your band.

00:47:50: You would be judged and if you could get a video shot.

00:47:55: Again, a lot of politics.

00:47:56: And right before we launched, we got shut down.

00:48:01: I had created a conference called WebNoise and I had Jay speak.

00:48:08: Jay got recruited by EMI and in ninety nine was made the first global head of digital at EMI hired by Ken Berry in London.

00:48:19: Jay called me and said, I want you to go to work with me.

00:48:22: I said, well, I'm really involved in this WebNoise thing.

00:48:25: Few months later, he hired me.

00:48:29: to put together a thing called the Summit Summit.

00:48:33: And he said, could you produce a private digital conference similar to WebNoise and similar to the one that I had met the Amazon people at?

00:48:41: I said, yeah.

00:48:42: And he said, could you monetize it?

00:48:44: I said, OK.

00:48:46: He said, how would you do it?

00:48:47: I said, well, you just hired twenty five digital people in London, in Paris, in Berlin, in.

00:48:55: I mean, we had people all over the world.

00:49:00: I said, you can say to Amazon, okay, you can fly around the world and meet all these people or you could come to Atlanta the week of May eighth.

00:49:07: This is two thousand.

00:49:09: now, May eighth, two thousand.

00:49:11: And you can spend the weekend and meet everybody in one place.

00:49:14: We're doing a three day retreat at the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead, Georgia, outside of Atlanta.

00:49:20: Oh, and by the way, you're buying dinner.

00:49:22: It's twenty five thousand dollars.

00:49:24: I ended up selling three hundred thousand dollars in sponsorships.

00:49:28: May sixth two thousand.

00:49:30: I walk into the bar at the Ritz-Carlton I walk into the bar and Jay's sitting there with a guy named Frazier.

00:49:36: Hollis Frazier was my client from Amplified.com and he was from Georgia.

00:49:41: and Frazier says Ted why didn't you tell me?

00:49:44: and I said tell you what.

00:49:46: And he hands me the program for the conference, and I'm reading it, and I went, oh yeah, this, I meant to call you.

00:49:52: It happened very quickly.

00:49:54: Frazier leaves about ten minutes later, and I turn to Jay, and I go, what the?

00:50:00: The program said, Jay Samet, Senior Vice President, New Media EMI, Ted Cohen, Vice President, New Media EMI.

00:50:09: I said, what did you do?

00:50:11: He said, I hired you.

00:50:13: I said, you can't hire me.

00:50:15: At the time, I had twenty five clients.

00:50:19: They were all paying me a retainer and I went, you can't afford me.

00:50:24: Well, this is three weeks after the dot com crash.

00:50:27: He says, no, I worked it all out with Ken.

00:50:30: You can keep all your clients, but I'm willing to bet you that by September, most of your clients will be gone.

00:50:38: and they were.

00:50:39: And you'll be able to show how smart you were by coming inside at EMI.

00:50:45: And I said, I said, we're going to let you keep your clients.

00:50:49: And I went, and you're going to pay me.

00:50:52: So I took the job.

00:50:54: And the next Monday morning, he introduced me as the new vice president of new media, DMI.

00:51:00: And I started doing deals.

00:51:02: Like you were saying, there's been a lot of shifts there, the shift away from physical product to digital to streaming.

00:51:09: You know, how did you kind of approach those early deals with the likes of iTunes and Rhapsody?

00:51:14: What was it like actually going and making those deals happen?

00:51:17: In the early days before Alon Levy and David Munz, it was Ken Berry and a guy named Tony Bates and me and Jay.

00:51:26: So I would negotiate a deal with you.

00:51:29: You wanted to do some type of a online service.

00:51:32: I would negotiate the deal.

00:51:33: I would show it to Jay.

00:51:34: He'd say, what's the advance?

00:51:36: I'd say, I've talked to Ocean out of a quarter of a million pounds.

00:51:39: He'd go, great, let me send it to Tony and Ken.

00:51:42: They would sign off and we were done.

00:51:43: I was able to start getting a lot of deals done.

00:51:46: One of the deals that I was trying to get done though was Rhapsody.

00:51:51: Now Rhapsody was streaming.

00:51:53: All you can eat all you can listen to you know unlimited plays for a set price every month and they said we hired you to Evolve the company not kill the company.

00:52:06: Why would we let people listen to anything they want whenever they want?

00:52:11: I said I've been playing with the.

00:52:14: you know the the prototype the beta.

00:52:16: it's Liberating and every time it gets played we get a penny.

00:52:21: I had negotiated a penny a play which didn't scale.

00:52:25: Because I realized later that if you listened five hours a day, five days a week, four weeks a month, that was fifteen hundred play events, and a penny a play was fifteen dollars for a service they were selling for ten dollars.

00:52:41: And that's before publishing and all the other costs.

00:52:44: So basically, if you are an avid listener, you are killing them.

00:52:49: So later I tried to renegotiate it, and now we're down to fractions of a penny because you don't want to convince people to not listen.

00:52:58: Anyway, though, they said, how do you know this will work?

00:53:02: I said, I'm telling you this is it.

00:53:04: And they said, what does McKinsey think?

00:53:07: And I said, I don't know.

00:53:08: I'll ask McKinsey.

00:53:09: A week later, I delivered this five page overview for McKinsey of an upcoming report on why streaming would be the future of the music business.

00:53:20: The only reason it was five pages long was that's all I could write in a week and Put charts in there and put McKenzie's logo on it.

00:53:29: There was no McKenzie report.

00:53:32: They hadn't been looking at whatever.

00:53:34: so I had to create this dummy Overview of this twenty thousand dollar report fifty pages whatever that we were quote going to buy someday when they finished it, but they never wrote it.

00:53:47: And they said well if McKenzie likes it we have to do it.

00:53:50: So we did the deal.

00:53:52: I always say everything was going great until September eleventh two thousand one.

00:53:57: Now we all know what happened on September eleventh two thousand one, but people might not know The tragedy that happened to EMI was we released the Mariah Carey Glitter album the worst record in the history of the music business hopefully say and I don't think their parents bought a copy.

00:54:19: I don't think her parents bought a copy and I had flown to New York, I took the red eye on September tenth, landed in New York at six thirty in the morning on September eleventh, went to the Time Hotel in Times Square right off of forty ninth and Broadway and went to the Food Emporium at forty ninth and eighth, bought some pretzels, some diet coke, some granola, went back to the room, turned on the TV and the first plane hit the World Trade Center.

00:54:48: And so I was in New York for Mariah Carey meetings.

00:54:52: We never had the meetings.

00:54:54: The album was a disaster.

00:54:56: The whole nine-year-old thing was a horrible thing for everybody.

00:55:01: Ken Berry and Nancy Berry got fired because the Mariah Carey album cost the company twenty-eight million dollars to sign her and there was a twenty-eight million dollar kill fee to drop her.

00:55:14: We dropped her and the next album was the album with Germaine Dupree that was the biggest record of her career.

00:55:19: But we let her go.

00:55:21: And they fired Ken and Nancy and brought in David Munz and Lon Levy.

00:55:25: David Munz was wonderful, but it then became, why are we licensing these various companies?

00:55:32: And the approval list became ridiculous.

00:55:36: They hired a guy named John Rose, who was the head of McKinsey, actually.

00:55:40: And he came in to be Jay and I's new boss.

00:55:44: Jay didn't like it.

00:55:45: Jay ended up going to Sony when they did Sony Connect, which was their iTunes.

00:55:52: Yeah.

00:55:53: I went up with John to Cupertino.

00:55:56: To me, it was Steve Jobs, Eddie Q, Bud Tribble, who was the chief software engineer and a guy named Jeff Robin, who actually had created the iTunes player that they had bought.

00:56:09: And we went through the whole iTunes thing and we were doing the deal.

00:56:13: And I come back to LA and I'm explaining to a guy named Ron Weary, who was the global head of sales, how iTunes works.

00:56:21: And he said, well, how many tracks will they order in advance?

00:56:26: I said, none.

00:56:28: What do you mean?

00:56:29: What's the pre-buy?

00:56:31: There is no pre-buy.

00:56:33: Well, how do we get paid?

00:56:36: I said, when a track sells or when an album sells, we get paid.

00:56:41: Yeah, but what's the load in?

00:56:42: There is no load.

00:56:44: Well, what does the front page cost?

00:56:47: They don't sell the front page.

00:56:49: Well, what does it cost to buy an ad?

00:56:50: on the service.

00:56:51: There's no advertising on the service.

00:56:54: Basically, it became apparent that it wasn't a fear of the technology.

00:57:00: It was a fear of a lot of the normal, you know, we sold a million units into Tower and Warehouse and Sam Goody and HMV and Fnac and all these stores around the world.

00:57:12: There was no pre-order.

00:57:14: There was no first day sale.

00:57:16: You know, the gaming of the system went away.

00:57:18: So, I really believe that it wasn't a fear of technology.

00:57:22: It was a fear of the transparency.

00:57:24: They quit it.

00:57:25: Now, later, everybody was able to game the system to a certain extent with, you know, buy the new Coldplay album and get a live video that's exclusive to iTunes that you can't get on Amazon.

00:57:39: You know, those games started.

00:57:40: It was challenging because I'd have to figure out what can I put in the deal to get it across to them that A, it's a great deal financially, but B, it's a great deal in terms of helping our artists reach.

00:57:53: At a certain point, I ended up realizing that I had to move on.

00:57:58: I stayed for six years.

00:57:59: Jay left and went to Sony Connect.

00:58:01: I ended up becoming global head of digital.

00:58:04: They brought in a guy, John Rose left, and they brought in a guy named Adam Klein, who was, it was a real mistake.

00:58:12: presented well.

00:58:13: He was South African and English, and he could read the phone book and it sounded impressive.

00:58:19: But he didn't have an original idea.

00:58:20: So I resigned.

00:58:21: I started TAG, launched with eighteen clients.

00:58:25: I'd give some guitar.

00:58:27: I had a sand disk.

00:58:29: We had some great clients.

00:58:30: And the thing is, whether I'm working at a company inside or I'm advising companies, I need to tell you what you need to hear.

00:58:40: You kind of referenced this a bit earlier when you were talking about this shift that the label needed to make because they were talking about what's the load in and what are the advanced orders.

00:58:48: And in this new digital paradigm, these things didn't actually exist.

00:58:52: And one of the things you called out probably before almost everybody else is you spoke about this move away from distribution and how that kind of became trivial.

00:59:02: That's just like the table stakes and the real battle was for attention.

00:59:06: I leave EMI in June of, I get a call from a friend of mine, Gail Becker, who is at Edelman, big PR firm, and she said, look, I hear you left EMI, I wanna do your PR, and here's the deal, I'll do your PR for free, and you'll listen in on calls with Microsoft and whatever, and afterwards tell me what the hell they were talking about.

00:59:33: This is like early days of Xbox and whatever.

00:59:36: and they were Xbox's PR firm.

00:59:39: And one day I'm talking to her, this is like late June, she said, what are you doing next month?

00:59:44: I said, well, I'm speaking at the Narm Conference National Association of Record Merchants, just now musicbiz.org.

00:59:51: I'm speaking there, I'm speaking at New Music Seminar in New York.

00:59:55: And then I've been invited to this thing at something called the Aspen Institute in Aspen, Colorado, to participate in a roundtable.

01:00:03: I said, but I think I'm going to cancel it.

01:00:05: And she said, do you know what the Espen Institute is?

01:00:08: And I said, no.

01:00:10: She said, have you ever been invited to speak at Davos?

01:00:14: I said, no.

01:00:15: She said, and you probably won't, but this will be as close as you will come and you have to go.

01:00:22: So I go there and it's the first week of August in two thousand six.

01:00:27: And I asked them and I go to, they had a campus and they had.

01:00:31: part of the campus was they had bought either a motel or an apartment building and it was now the dormitory and I get there and I go to my room and there's a cocktail party Wednesday night and I go to the cocktail party in the main building and I look around the room for a couple minutes and I walk over to a guiding charlie firestone who at the time was the executive director and I said I just have one question coffee or dessert.

01:00:56: he said what are you talking about?

01:00:58: I said, am I here to serve coffee or am I here to serve dessert?

01:01:01: He said, what do you mean?

01:01:02: I said, well, unless you've hired look-alikes, that's Craig Newmark from Craig's List.

01:01:08: That's Madeline Albright, former Secretary of State.

01:01:12: That's Reed Hunt from the FCC.

01:01:15: That's Chris Saca from Google.

01:01:17: I forget who the other people were.

01:01:18: And I said, and me, he said, no, you're the guest of honor.

01:01:21: I said, what are you talking about?

01:01:23: He said, I've seen some of the things you've talked about.

01:01:26: He said, I want you to do a presentation Friday morning on the transition from a distribution economy to an attention economy.

01:01:35: He said, do you understand what I'm talking about?

01:01:37: I said, yeah, I've been talking about this a lot, but I gave a talk on Friday and we have this huge round table and it's all the people, it's Craig Newmark, it's Reed Hunt, it's Madeline Albright, it's Chris Saka, it's Linda Resnick.

01:01:52: Resnick and her husband own Fiji Water, Palm Wonderful, Pomegranate Juice, Teleflora, Smokehouse Almonds.

01:02:01: They have a house in, I don't know if they still live in that house.

01:02:04: It's the farthest I've ever walked inside in one direction without hitting an outside wall.

01:02:10: She had a cocktail party Thursday night at her place, and they had a staff of sixty at the house.

01:02:18: Anyway, there's all these people sitting around the table, and I do this presentation.

01:02:21: talking about how we move from, you know, getting it on the radio and getting it into tower to, you know, I can hear anything I want on Rhapsody or Spotify now.

01:02:31: I can hear anything I want.

01:02:32: I mean, I can buy anything I want on Amazon.

01:02:36: And at one point, Madeline Albright raises her hand just.

01:02:40: Can you go a little bit deeper into the attention part of it?

01:02:44: How do we get attention?

01:02:45: I started talking about a few months earlier, about a year earlier, actually, in February of two thousand five, I get a phone call from somebody I used to work with.

01:02:54: And he says, can I come over?

01:02:55: I want you to meet a friend of mine.

01:02:57: I said, OK, but it's Grammy Sunday.

01:03:00: You got to come over by like, you know, can you come over in the next hour?

01:03:03: This is like ten in the morning.

01:03:05: He said, yeah, I said, because I got to get ready to go to the Grammys.

01:03:08: So he comes over with this friend of his and he says we've just started a new pirate music service.

01:03:15: We'd like you to join the board and I go.

01:03:18: I can't join the board of a pirate music service.

01:03:21: I work at EMI.

01:03:23: But this other thing that you started looks really cool.

01:03:26: I'd love to get involved.

01:03:27: He goes well right now.

01:03:28: It's pretty much the investors that are the board and whatever we can talk about it later.

01:03:33: But the other reason we wanted to come over is We flew down to LA to go to some Grammy parties and nobody will invite us.

01:03:41: Could you sneak the guy, my friends, that I know.

01:03:44: you said you work on the EMI Grammy parties every year.

01:03:47: And the reason I worked on them, which was totally nothing to do with my job, was I knew everybody in line.

01:03:53: So if you were at the end of the line, I would come grab you and go, he's okay, let him in.

01:03:58: He's on the list.

01:03:59: I'll check it off.

01:04:00: I mean, I had a headset like not like that.

01:04:02: I, you know, walkie-talkie the whole bit.

01:04:04: And I'm like, running digital and I'm like you know what they call wrangling the line going.

01:04:11: no that's Mo Austin from Warner.

01:04:13: let him in.

01:04:15: so I said look show up at the Beverly Hills Hotel tonight.

01:04:17: have a piece of paper in your hand.

01:04:19: look for me show me the blank piece of paper and I'll go.

01:04:23: oh yeah you're on the list.

01:04:24: don't worry come on in.

01:04:26: so that night February of two thousand five I was able to sneak Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg into the EMI Grammy party because nobody would invite them.

01:04:37: Yeah.

01:04:38: So fast forward.

01:04:41: The reason I was saying that was Facebook had evolved.

01:04:44: Facebook had now gone out of its stealth mode of being just Harvard and Stanford, that you had to have a .edu email address.

01:04:52: They had set me up.

01:04:53: I was like a non-college student on Facebook.

01:04:56: So I was familiar with it.

01:04:57: I said, well, social media is going to play a big part in.

01:05:00: And I started talking about, you know, my space had been bought by Fox.

01:05:05: and then killed.

01:05:06: Facebook had taken off.

01:05:08: I don't think we had Instagram yet, and Twitter hadn't started.

01:05:11: But the impact of social media was really beginning to show, you know, its effect on what was becoming popular.

01:05:21: But listen, Ted, you just kind of spoke about how you could see something in the entertainment industry that very few people were seeing about this shift towards the experience economy.

01:05:32: and, you know, another or the attention economy, should I say, and another thing that you've been very prescient with is this move away from consumption towards experience.

01:05:42: Yeah, how do you see this kind of playing out with the new kind of technology that we have?

01:05:47: You've got all this kind of incredible lineage and you're able to see these things before they were happening, before they became mainstream.

01:05:54: Where do you see this idea of the entertainment experience economy going?

01:05:59: Well, one of the things I learned early on playing with Rhapsody was I could hear whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.

01:06:07: But imagine if you were sitting at home in front of your stereo system listening to BBC.

01:06:14: And at the end of every song, it said, OK, what do you want to hear next?

01:06:18: OK, what do you want to hear next?

01:06:22: The ability to hear whatever I want is great.

01:06:25: The reality is I don't want to have to make those choices.

01:06:29: So playlists became very important.

01:06:33: And not just, you know, we talk even again gaming the system, people talk about hiring a playlist expert to submit your playlist so that your song is, you know, really cleverly in between Don Henley and Elton John, because you're the next Don John.

01:06:51: I've never said that before.

01:06:52: Okay.

01:06:52: Don John.

01:06:53: Okay.

01:06:53: It works.

01:06:55: But.

01:06:56: You want to be able to lean in which was the equivalent of pressing the button on your car radio to go to a different station.

01:07:03: But ideally the best experience is a lean back.

01:07:06: Just let it wash over me.

01:07:08: Let it be like that's cool.

01:07:10: Wow What is that?

01:07:13: and if something comes up?

01:07:14: You don't know what it is and you hear it, you know Put a bookmark on it or a tag on it to go later saying Okay, what's that?

01:07:23: and if I want to I'm listening to Billie Eilish a playlist and the track comes up by Imaging Hate and I go you know what.

01:07:33: I've always wondered more about her music and I click on it and it takes me in an Imaging Hate playlist and I go.

01:07:40: okay enough of that.

01:07:41: I want to go back to where I was.

01:07:42: The ability to move between a lean forward and a lean back experience is great and then Play me the demo of that.

01:07:51: I want to hear it.

01:07:52: And is there a video of that?

01:07:54: Did somebody post something from a show?

01:07:57: The experience.

01:07:58: Take me on a journey.

01:07:59: Let me jump off the playlist, which is a spine, and go look at various things and then come back.

01:08:08: And what was that that I heard yesterday?

01:08:10: I tagged that song.

01:08:11: Give me things.

01:08:13: Let me hear the live version of it.

01:08:15: Let me hear a different version.

01:08:17: I mean, for me, those are good experiences.

01:08:20: You know, I've always had an open door policy.

01:08:23: This is going to sound really weird, but I've always, you know, if I didn't know you, you sent me an email and said, can we get together for coffee?

01:08:29: I go, yeah, sure.

01:08:30: And whoever, whether it's my current girlfriend, my ex-wife, whatever it is, where are you going?

01:08:35: I'm going to meet with this guy, what does he do?

01:08:38: I don't know.

01:08:38: I'll find out when I get there.

01:08:40: Why do you meet with people and you don't know why you're meeting with them?

01:08:42: I said, some of the best people I've ever met were just like, you know, a cold, you know, a cold call not a cold call but you know yeah.

01:08:50: so I mean music is transformative yeah and our access to music is.

01:08:55: we've never had better access to great stuff than we have now.

01:09:01: and when artists argue about that Spotify isn't paying them enough.

01:09:06: They don't know that you used to sit at home and cry that the radio station wasn't playing your record and the store wasn't stocking your record.

01:09:15: And so you were cut off at the knees at the beginning.

01:09:18: Even though you might have one of the greatest pieces of music ever, you were on the wrong label or your sales guy didn't message it correctly.

01:09:27: And so you never got off the ground.

01:09:31: And now you have the ability.

01:09:32: at least Your music's everywhere.

01:09:34: It's Spotify.

01:09:35: It's, you know, Apple.

01:09:36: It's, it's everywhere.

01:09:39: You have the ability, if you, if you care about your career to have a certain amount of control, you know, you have total control.

01:09:48: But if you, if you give up some of that control to somebody who works with you for you, you can manage your social media messaging.

01:09:57: You can connect with your fans.

01:09:58: I did.

01:10:00: There's a rapper named Jim Jones.

01:10:02: I'm doing it.

01:10:03: This is the beginning of Twitter.

01:10:04: I did think of the one forty conference in New York that a guy named Jeff Paul.

01:10:09: Jeff Paul.

01:10:10: Absolutely.

01:10:11: Yeah.

01:10:11: Wonderful

01:10:12: guy.

01:10:12: Great guy.

01:10:12: Had me do this panel with Jim Jones and we're talking about how Twitter is is taking off.

01:10:18: And he said he had a friend or another rapper who in a matter of two or three weeks had amassed a half a million followers.

01:10:27: And then in a matter of a few weeks, lost them all.

01:10:31: Because all he did was say, buy my record, come to my show, listen to my music, click on my space pay.

01:10:38: I mean, this was, you know, and he didn't talk about, have you heard the new Drake song?

01:10:44: You gotta go see Mission Impossible III, God forbid.

01:10:47: Talk about music or a book or a movie that touches you, not just about me, me, me, me,

01:10:55: me.

01:10:55: Talking about kind of building those relationships and, you know, creating the social media.

01:11:00: Yeah, absolutely.

01:11:01: You

01:11:01: know, I have one of the things you and I've talked about before is like, quote, playing the long game.

01:11:07: And basically building your village of people that can count on you and that you can count on.

01:11:14: And Daryl Ballantine, who you and I are both friends with, Daryl was my intern at EMI in two thousand three.

01:11:23: I met him a Canadian Music Week.

01:11:25: earlier that year, and he needed to intern somewhere to finish his business degree at University of Waterloo in Canada.

01:11:35: He came to LA, he interned for me.

01:11:36: He left.

01:11:38: He called me back saying, I want to come to EMI and work for you now.

01:11:41: And I said, I'm getting out of here.

01:11:42: He said, I decided I'm out.

01:11:45: And I said, what are your other ideas?

01:11:47: And he said, Well, we had played with a lyric service, but we decided to shut it down before we got sued because we had no licenses.

01:11:57: I've now been on the board of lyric find for twenty one years.

01:12:01: I work for my intern.

01:12:04: He's a wonderful human being, as you know, and I've watched him evolve, grow, mature.

01:12:11: I can't call him a kid anymore.

01:12:13: He's got two children.

01:12:15: He's married and I will be flying a month.

01:12:18: Actually, it's a little bit less than a month to Toronto for the annual Christmas party company town hall meeting and board meeting.

01:12:27: And it's just been a pleasure watching him grow.

01:12:30: Mark Geiger, who started Artist Direct and started Lollapalooza was the head of the concert committee at San Diego State University when I met him in eighty three.

01:12:41: He's not one of my mentors.

01:12:44: So.

01:12:45: You know, be nice to people if you can be nice to them.

01:12:50: Don't be a dick.

01:12:52: And those are words to live by.

01:12:53: And

01:12:53: that's it.

01:12:54: I did artist development.

01:12:55: I did this turn to technology.

01:12:58: I started working with startups and with big companies.

01:13:02: Working with startups and working with big companies is like working with a baby band or working with the who or the Beach Boys.

01:13:12: A band is a startup and a startup is a band.

01:13:15: So when Apple started the band was Steve Jobs lead singer Steve Wozniak lead guitarist and songwriter and as Apple grew Wozniak left the band Steve Jobs remained the lead singer.

01:13:31: You know Johnny I've became the new lead guitarist and Bud Tribble became the drummer.

01:13:36: who's the chief technology officer?

01:13:38: The band grows.

01:13:40: the first product was the Apple one which became the Apple two.

01:13:44: That was their first album and their second album.

01:13:47: And what do you do for your third album?

01:13:49: The parallels between your record company signs you and then says, get rid of the bass player.

01:13:55: Your VC puts money into your company and then says, get rid of your head of marketing.

01:14:02: At every point, somebody's messing with either your band or your startup to try and mold you into what they think you ought to be.

01:14:11: And you have to fight it.

01:14:14: And you have to keep your vision.

01:14:16: You are known almost universally as the godfather of digital music for all this pioneering work, you know, real rock and roll backstory there.

01:14:24: Are there any specific moments that kind of come to mind now as being something that you're very proud of and talk to us a bit about what might have happened behind the scenes to lead up to it?

01:14:34: In January,

01:14:35: two thousand one, I'm in Las Vegas with Jay.

01:14:37: We're coming out of the Bellagio Cafe and the Bellagio Hotel.

01:14:42: and the phone rings, and the guy goes, hi, this is Scott Young.

01:14:45: Do you remember me?

01:14:47: I said, yeah, you're Clark Duvall's assistant at Capitol.

01:14:50: I said, are you still doing that?

01:14:52: He said, no.

01:14:53: He said, you were the only person he used to talk to me about what I wanted to do when I left being Clark's assistant.

01:15:01: I said, what do you mean?

01:15:02: He said, nobody ever would talk to me.

01:15:04: Every time you came to see Clark, you'd say, so what do you want to do next?

01:15:07: And call me if you need help.

01:15:10: I said, oh, so what are you doing now?

01:15:12: He says, I'm global head of digital for Best Buy.

01:15:17: I said, cool, that's great.

01:15:19: I said, what can I do to help?

01:15:20: He said, no, I'm calling you.

01:15:22: What can I do to help you?

01:15:23: I had just been in the middle of putting together a project that involved all of my village.

01:15:30: I got asked by Sandisk.

01:15:32: They wanted to release the Rolling Stones new album, The Bigger Bang.

01:15:36: on a SanDisk Micro SD card.

01:15:39: And because they had this new technology called Trusted Flash, they could put the entire Stone's catalog on this Micro SD card.

01:15:48: So the idea was you bought the new Stone's album and it was twenty five dollars on the SD card.

01:15:53: But it was a cool thing.

01:15:55: But on that card was the entire Rolling Stones catalog.

01:15:59: I could go in and I could unlock sticky fingers or exile in Main Street.

01:16:04: Everybody in what I needed to make this happen was somebody who I had a good relationship with.

01:16:11: I started working on the project on a Tuesday.

01:16:15: By the following Monday, Rick Thomas had been in Paris with Mick, Mick said fine, Virgin said fine, Abco said, we'll let the Abco catalog go on it.

01:16:27: It was the first, I think, and only unification of the Rolling Stones catalog.

01:16:34: And we put it out.

01:16:35: It won all kinds of awards.

01:16:37: It didn't sell a lot because the reality was there weren't that many devices that you could actually unlock the music on.

01:16:45: But the proof of concept was interesting in that you could, at the time that you were buying digital media, you could acquire it.

01:16:54: But the point I'm trying to make very inarticulately is, be nice as long as you can.

01:17:01: Yeah.

01:17:02: Yeah, one hundred percent.

01:17:03: So I mean, I love what I do.

01:17:04: I'm still right now.

01:17:05: I'm going over to meet in two hours with the Dean of the Arts and Science School to figure out what I'm doing here next semester.

01:17:13: I've ended up moving to Tulsa here, which we didn't talk about.

01:17:17: I ended up moving here nine months ago now.

01:17:20: And basically I'm teaching digital transformation of the entertainment industry, history of the music business, how to start a digital label, And I'm getting basically, because you know, I don't like to talk a lot.

01:17:31: I'm getting to profit.

01:17:34: So I'm going in to meet with the dean.

01:17:36: I had to deal with an interesting situation.

01:17:38: was in two thousand eighteen, I got invited by a friend to come here and help Woody Guthrie center with some ideas around fundraising.

01:17:45: I met the people who were building the Bob Dylan center at the time.

01:17:48: They were about to break ground.

01:17:50: Four years later, I got invited back for the opening of the Bob Dylan center.

01:17:54: I ran into the people from Kane's ballroom.

01:17:56: invited me in January of twenty-three to come to Cain's Ballroom for the forty-fifth anniversary of the Sex Fistals at Cain's Ballroom.

01:18:07: While I'm there, I get a call from a friend from Windows Media who had moved back to Tulsa from Seattle saying, I want you to meet the president of the University of Tulsa.

01:18:18: I think you should come here and lecture.

01:18:19: I end up meeting the president of the University, Brad Carson.

01:18:25: They invite me to an Alice Cooper motley crew death leopard show at the football stadium the first stadium concert at the university in twenty years.

01:18:35: I'm up in the president's box on the fifty yard line and I'm talking to this guy and his kid and I said so who do you like better dad?

01:18:43: who do you like son?

01:18:45: who do you like?

01:18:45: do you both like Alice or do you both like Motley crew?

01:18:49: and The guy says to me says what do you do?

01:18:51: He says how did you end up here?

01:18:53: I said, oh, Brad invited me.

01:18:54: We're talking about maybe me coming here and, you know, giving a talk.

01:18:59: He said, you should teach here.

01:19:01: I said, why?

01:19:02: What do you do?

01:19:03: He says, I'm George Justice.

01:19:05: I'm the provost at the university.

01:19:08: And I went, okay.

01:19:11: So he says, let's get you here.

01:19:12: So February of twenty four and October of twenty four, I came for a week.

01:19:20: on campus, we have the largest Starbucks in Oklahoma.

01:19:26: So they did this thing.

01:19:29: This was Tuesdays with Ted in Starbucks.

01:19:33: Dude, that's

01:19:34: beautiful.

01:19:34: And we did this thing.

01:19:35: It was hilarious.

01:19:36: I'm sitting in Starbucks on Tuesdays for two hours and they promoted it that you could come over and just sit like you and I are talking, you know.

01:19:46: I've met people that are screenwriters.

01:19:48: I've met these two students.

01:19:50: If you want to feel humbled, I met this brother and sister who are from Afghanistan and are going to the computer school.

01:19:59: And they're working part-time jobs here in Tulsa, sending the money home to their parents who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq.

01:20:10: And we talk about, oh, I couldn't get the parking space that I wanted.

01:20:15: the mall.

01:20:19: It really humbles you.

01:20:21: Yeah.

01:20:22: I'm trying to help them get a remote internship with Nvidia right now.

01:20:27: Amazing.

01:20:28: I'm donating.

01:20:29: I brought all this stuff with me.

01:20:30: Basically, all of the stuff I've had over the years got coalesced here in Tulsa.

01:20:36: I have Klika vision and television, Atari, SEGA, whatever.

01:20:42: I'm donating all my video game stuff to the computer school.

01:20:46: They're coming over in two weeks to pick up.

01:20:49: I don't need any more stuff.

01:20:51: Yeah.

01:20:52: Anyway, but I love it.

01:20:53: If there's anybody, when this airs, I will pause here.

01:20:57: If you want to get in touch with me, the best email is tedstrategic, onewordatgmail.com.

01:21:04: And if there's anything I've talked about that you want to continue the conversation, write me.

01:21:10: If I don't write back right away, write me again gently.

01:21:14: Jewish Guild has a lot of effect on me.

01:21:17: And I will end up going, I never got back to him.

01:21:21: So I will get back to you.

01:21:24: I'm having fun.

01:21:25: And I'm glad we did this.

01:21:26: And hopefully I really enjoyed it.

01:21:30: Dude, thank you so much.

01:21:31: You're so generous with your time.

01:21:32: But I was expecting nothing less.

01:21:34: You are the godfather of digital music.

01:21:37: And you have one of the most fascinating life stories in career arcs.

01:21:41: of anybody you could possibly spend some time with.

01:21:43: But I have one more question for you, and it is one that we ask all of our VIP guests, everyone from Image and Heap, to AR Raman, to Carl Cox, to whoever.

01:21:53: And that is to choose a track for our VIP title playlist.

01:21:58: And you have a lot to choose from.

01:22:00: There is a song over the years.

01:22:02: I mean, Todd Rodriguez has a track called Be Nice to Me, which I would come home from EMI or I would come home from a meeting and I would just put this track by Todd Rundgrenand called Be Nice to Me, which is a great song.

01:22:16: But there is a transformative song from an album called Famous Blue Raincoat by Jennifer Warrens.

01:22:21: It's the songs of Leonard Cohen and the song's called The Song of Bernadette.

01:22:26: And there is something about the song with its chord changes, its modulations, it's the way she vocalizes every time I hear it.

01:22:36: as Barbra Streisand would say, I get for clipped.

01:22:39: I get my chin lit.

01:22:40: I mean, literally the song can bring me to tears.

01:22:44: I was interviewing somebody and we're talking about the effect of music.

01:22:47: And I said, let me play you something.

01:22:48: And I put headphones on her and she started sobbing.

01:22:52: And she didn't know that I was expecting her to have a reaction.

01:22:56: She went, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.

01:22:59: And I said, there's something in there that shows literally the physiological effect of music.

01:23:06: how it can slow your heart rate, how it can see you.

01:23:09: And it's not about chanting or going to a retreat for ten thousand dollars a week.

01:23:14: Music can help you, you know, find your center and that's why I do what I do.

01:23:20: So thank you so much for having me.

01:23:22: That's an absolutely exquisite choice to tune there, Ted.

01:23:25: Thank you so much.

01:23:26: And my own contribution to this episode's playlist, because it's not every day you get to chat with somebody who toured with Fleetwood Mac back in the day.

01:23:33: Of course, it has to be The Chain by Fleetwood Mac.

01:23:36: So listen, thank you so, so much for joining us.

01:23:38: You've been very generous with your time.

01:23:40: It's always great to catch up with you.

01:23:41: The godfather of digital music, Ted Cohen.

01:23:44: Thank you.

01:23:46: So there you have it, folks.

01:23:47: That was the one and only Ted Cohen.

01:23:50: a true pioneer, the godfather of digital music, a connector, a champion of the digital music.

01:23:56: revolution, really a champion of great music and the kind of fun music industry that makes the magic happen all over the world and delights our ears on a daily basis.

01:24:05: So if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to follow Audio Talks, wherever you get your favorite podcasts and do leave us a review.

01:24:12: It really helps others to get to know about the incredible people that we speak to in every podcast.

01:24:16: For more exclusive content, some behind the scenes goodies and maybe even some competitions, be sure to follow us over on the Instagram.

01:24:22: You can find us at Audio Talks podcast.

01:24:25: My name's Oshin Lonnie, thank you so much for joining us and I do hope to see you the next time.