This course will examine the music industry in the United States, with the unique perspective gained by Vanderbilt University’s location in Nashville, TN. Nashville is a major center of music in the United States, and the music created here has a global reach, particularly in the country, rock, pop, singer-songwriter, and Americana genres. However, students will learn that the basic principles of recording, marketing, copyright, licensing, and live performance are the same, regardless of musical style or genre. The music business is one of the most rapidly changing industries in the US today. It is also an industry filled with contradiction, and media headlines and anecdotal stories often add to the confusion. Here are just a few statements paraphrased from recent news stories: * The music business has collapsed * Demand for music is expanding at the greatest rate in history * Historic recording studios are closing at an alarming rate * More people are making recordings than ever before * Musicians usually lose money touring * Musicians usually make money touring * Major artist pulls songs off streaming services because they don’t pay fairly * Major artist makes a fortune from streaming services * People won’t buy records anymore * Vinyl record sales are soaring This course will attempt to make sense of these seemingly contradictory trends and data, outline the basic structure and mechanisms of today’s music industry, and encourage students to think critically and entrepreneurially about the future of music. Leaders from various areas of the music business will lend their perspectives through in-depth interviews, and footage from a recording session will give learners a behind the scenes look at how a song goes from the spark of an idea hummed into a cell phone to a finished recording. Participants will grapple with questions about art and commerce which are both timeless and crucially important today, and will emerge from this course with tools allowing them to make more informed decisions as creators, promoters, and consumers of music. Course launches February 19, 2016.
Interview: David Macias
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Understanding the Music Business: What is Music Worth?
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New Models, Trends & Strategies
Upheaval in many sectors of the music industry – much of it brought by the digital revolution – has led innovative people on both the business and artistic sides of the industry to do business in new ways. You will learn about opportunities for entrepreneurialism that come with technological advances; you will think critically about the controversies that arise when traditional businesses must redefine their relationships with artists; and you will hear from a business owner who has succeeded by questioning old boundaries and focusing on artist services. You will wrap up your engagement with the course by considering some larger ethical questions and asking yourself what you can do to support a healthy music ecosystem.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Jen GundermanAssistant Professor of Musicology
Blair School of Music
[MUSIC]
>> I'm here today with David Macias who is both a Grammy winning producer and
the co-founder of a company called Thirty Tigers that we're going to be talking
about today.
Thirty Tigers provides both distribution and
marketing services to its artists as well as management, publishing and
recently I understand you've also gotten into film.
>> Correct. >> Thank you so much for
being with me today, David.
I appreciate your time.
>> My pleasure.
>> You worked for years at a large mainstream record labels before you had
this idea to found Thirty Tigers.
So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit, first,
about your experience in the mainstream industry and
then how you saw that you could do something different with Thirty Tigers.
>> Sure.
Well, I was [COUGH] fortunate enough at a very young age to be hired.
My first full time job in the music business on the label side was with
Arista Records and before that, I mean, I started in retail when I was 15.
So I really have never done anything other than the music business and
I got the opportunity to work for Arista when I was 21,
and majority of the time that I spent in the major label world.
I had a few stints elsewhere, but nothing timewise to really speak of.
But at Arista, I learned a lot about the process of
what it takes to have a national conversation about
creative work and one of the things that was really
a formative idea was just not fooling yourself.
Working under Clive Davis, he didn't fool himself.
He was very into the details of what was happening in Providence, Rhode Island.
What was the reaction to the single in Pittsburgh,
things like that and it was a great grounding.
And that ethic, really informed the whole company and then working for
the national division under Tim DuBois and Mike Duncan.
They were both that way, but they also were very loving people.
There was this joy that permeated that whole experience and
so that, I think was also very formative.
And so, I learned a lot in my time working for Arista.
And then when it came time,
when the major label world invited me to find other employment.
>> [LAUGH] >> I thought about what I wanted to do,
but also structurally, how it would really serve creators.
Because the one of the things about starting a label, a lot of
people have started record labels and my background was in sales and marketing.
So I used to go and talk to Walmart about Alan Jackson records,
and I was paid a decent amount of money to do that.
But if you're going to be starting with a record label and
all the representative parts of the demand creation,
and satiating the supply chain.
If those are all sort of owned under this label umbrella,
there are infrastructure costs that put a lot of economic pressure
on to immediately generate revenue and you're sort of in almost
a little bit of a, you're very acutely of the clock running.
And so, what I did was I decided to start a company that would be
to help the creators whether it was producers or artists themselves.
Get the skill sets that they needed by on the sales and marketing and
these things without having to own it.
So I would say rather than one person hire me for $50,000 a year,
I would get ten people to hire me for $5,000 a year.
And because most of them when they're starting up,
they don't need a full time sales and marketing person.
And I thought that that would be, it would both be a smarter way for
me, I mean it would help financially.
It would help those companies be more successful, because it took a lot.
Some of the infrastructure burden off of them, but it was also safer for me,
because I wasn't hooking myself on to one company with whom my presence
would actually be sort of an albatross just by the fact that I was taking so
much of their infrastructure costs.
And so the genesis of the company, we were consultancy.
And so, we would just the person Deb Markland and I who was my co-founder.
We would just earn a monthly retainer fee to come in and
oversee these efforts and- >> So
what kinds of people in the early days would typically hire you not individual
artists who had records necessarily, but- >> Well,
our first client was an independent record label.
>> Okay. >> And we would often be hired by their
other clients were individual artists.
I mean, it was all over the place and it still is all over the place.
So about a year into that, the distributor that we worked with the most,
which was Red Distribution, which was owned by Sony.
They really liked the work that we did, because I think Deb and
I came out of Arista.
We had a very realism based way of approaching.
And also one thing that record labels, there's many ways in which a traditional
record label is not a good thing, but one of the one of the reasons that does make
them good is that there's a sense of process.
There's a sense of being able to design a campaign and execute a campaign.
>> Right. >> And so I think Deb and
I coming from that environment were able to bring that sense
of process to the independent community to be able to articulate what the demand
creation was to the salespeople to arm them to go,
whether it was putting records in Walmart or Borders or wherever they needed to go.
And when we started this company, it was 2001.
So, there was no digital distribution.
There was no iTunes then.
>> Right, right. >> And so if you didn't have distribution,
you were sunk.
So it was important for the sales reps to be able to arm or to be able to have
the information to go in and get the Avett Brothers where they needed to go,
and have a rationale to get boarders to buy what they needed,
and put into storage where it needed to go.
>> Right.
>> And if we could do that, then we were being a benefit to
the distribution company, but also the artist as well.
>> Right. >> And so in a sense that's what we do
now, we help artists think through the distribution or their marketing plan.
We've grown from Deb and
I working out of our guest bedrooms to now we have 29 employees.
And so, we cover a myriad of services as we've grown continually.
As we've grown, we've Invested back into the company.
So, we have a three person staff.
We have somebody who deals with independent stores and somebody who deals
with the digital service providers, and somebody who deals with the bigger chains.
We have somebody who helps artists sort their manufacturing.
We have radio people.
There's a whole, most people just think we're a record label at this point,
but the core of what we do remains the same is that we do not own any content.
We don't own any intellectual property.
We don't own any copyrights.
We don't own anything.
We are straight out a service company.
And I remind my employees of that all the time that
we're here to provide A service that this is not about us,
it's about the artist and their work and
how we bridge the gap between them and the consumer
in terms of explaining what this work of art is about.
[MUSIC]
>> And it's a remarkable success story during a time where you hear a lot of
failure stories, I like what you just said about being service oriented.
And I think that one of the things that musicians have really responded to,
at least musicians I know have responded to, about what you do,
one of the things that you do is allow artists to retain control of their master
recordings and- >> Absolutely.
>> I wanted you to first, explain what that means to our learners.
>> Sure. >> And also tell us why you came to this
sort of attitude about intellectual property.
>> Well, so first of all, when an artist records for a label, and
there's all kinds of different relationships, but
almost all of those relationships involve the label paying an advance to the artist,
but basically the label then retains ownership of that work.
>> Right. So when Bob Dylan records for
Columbia Records, Columbia Records owns those recordings,
and they pay the artist a royalty on those.
But the financial terms have been pretty uniform and standard, but
a lot of the control over what happens with those recordings and the financial
relationships are dictated by the people who own the intellectual property.
>> Right. >> And so there's something that feels,
I mean being that I came out of sales, sales is the impediment of,
or the removal of all impediments to a yes.
And so if I want to work with an artist, and I can give them a,
one of the things that's very important to them at the courts,
like I've created this thing, this came from within me, and so.
>> For an artist. >> Yeah, for an artist.
>> Yeah. >> And so if we can be of service to them
and be really good at helping them organize
the conversation between the creator and the consumer.
But do it in a way that allows the economics of it to work out so
that they can retain ownership, that's going to allow me to do a lot more
business because- >> Yeah.
>> It's a very difficult thing for an artist to feel like I've created
this thing and now I'm basically selling it off or giving it away and
often- >> Yes.
>> Under terms that they're not happy with but they don't really have many other
options, and I'm trying to provide another you know option to that so-
>> In some ways,
it's sort of the opposite of the 360 deal.
>> And in fact, I referred to us as the home of the 60 deal-
>> RIght.
[LAUGH] >> Because we don't,
not only do we not own their masters,
we only keep 10% of the wholesale cost of the music.
So the artist retains basically about 75% of the gross value of the recordings.
Now the thing that is different is, under a label relationship,
the label takes on the costs of the, they underwrite many of the costs.
I mean the recording costs are deducted from the advance.
>> Right.
>> Right away, but in terms of the marketing of the record,
it's something that the label undertakes.
But they pay an artist a royalty that's anywhere near between 15 and
20%- >> Right.
>> Which is not really 15 or
20% because they have all these standard industry deductions.
What we do is, we do a 75%, 75% of the revenues go to the artist but
all of the expenses are charged back to the artist, in terms of advertising and
all that, but we devise the plan in consultation with the artists.
We get their approval of all, we basically map out the entire financial life of
their record and say we're going to spend this much on publicity,
we're going to do this, and we front a lot of that money, too.
So we don't always front all of the money, but
we often front, well, quite often we front all of the money,
we basically take as much risk as we feel like we can.
I mean if we're going to earn 10%, then that 10% is sacred,
I mean I can't run a business if I don't have the cost certainty of knowing
that we're going to earn a certain amount based on what our work will produce.
But financially it winds up working out much better for
the artist in our, I'll not name names.
We had an artist recently do 150,000 units on their record, and they,
after all expenses were paid back, they earned a net of $650,000,
which that would never happen in a traditional label deal.
>> No, I'll also not name names and say that I know somebody who sold 300,000
copies of a record and didn't make any money because they didn't recoup-
>> Right.
>> From the major label that they were part of.
>> But they probably, only slightly in the label's defense,
f they had the ability to earn a, there was probably a gap,
they got an advance that probably gave them some remunerations.
There was some gap between the advance they got and
the cost of the recording, but what was left over
was probably not nearly enough to give them proper
remuneration for their work, that's my guess.
But I also don't want to make judgments on,
I mean as long as everybody knows the score, I don't fault anybody for
getting into any business relationship or offering any terms.
We're in a competitive marketplace, we're in a competitive environment.
>> Yeah. >> I think there is a certain morality to
what it is I'm offering, but I don't like to actually talk about that.
That's not really what I sell because if we can't do the job for the artist,
we're not the right home for the artist.
But if we can do the job as well or better, which I think is the case,
I'm very proud of my team and how good we are at marketing records.
But if we can do the job as well or better than our label competitors, and
they actually get to own their recordings, ad they make a lot more money
off of their recordings, then why wouldn't they do business with us?
And that increasingly is what's happened- >> Right.
>> That's really what's fueled the enormous growth of the company.
>> What strikes me about what you're saying right now is that you are so
transparent about, well, this is exactly how the money happens with us.
And there are a lot of calls right now for increasing transparency in the business.
>> I couldn't agree more.
>> What do you think will happen if everybody sort of knew where all the money
was going,
do you think this is a realistic thing to expect from the business in the future?
What do you think is going to happen in order for that transparency to happen?
>> Well once again transparency is an asset in
the conversation when you're talking with artists.
And, I mean to me, in a market place where nobody
is offering transparent options then the artist
just has to find a least onerous relationship,
but one of the things we do with >> 30 tigers as we give people
access to the Red's B to B, their business to business site, so
that they can actually look at their orders and their activity in real time.
We provide very easy to understand statements to our artists.
In 14 plus years, we've never been audited once and we've never been in court.
And if you give people, once again, I think there's a morality to transparency,
but there's also pragmatism in transparency.
>> Sure. >> And so-
>> So, why doesn't everybody do that?
>> Well, because I think that a lot of the traditional music
business is based in fear.
I think there was a lot of people who work in the business
came up during a time and have built there lives
around y sort of speak about this construct.
This fictional music business executive up in New York.
He's a wonderful human being.
He's late 40s.
He loves music.
You go out to a bar and talk music with him and he knows everything.
He's just a good dude, but he's got a house in Greenwich, Connecticut,
he bought a modest house for Greenwich standards, $1.8 million.
He's got a daughter at Brown University.
>> Yeah.
[LAUGH] >> He's got a daughter who's in tenth
grade and they're started to think about how colleges, and
he's got a life that he has to pay for.
And so when you're in those meetings and
you're talking about the financials, and you're talking about an industry
that went from 14 billion in 2001 down to 7 billion today, and
you're talking about the company making these investments in an artist.
It's an easy thing to be able to say, they wouldn't be able to tour.
They wouldn't be able to go out and make the money that they make on the road,
if not for this investment that we're making and it's not practical for
us to make this investment unless we can monetize it in other ways.
That's a very- >> Right.
>> Logical construct.
>> Yes, yes.
>> And also their songs wouldn't be on the radio, if it weren't for
not only the fact that we paid for this recording, but
the fact that we Pay a radio promotion staff to go get it on the radio.
So, we definitely should take part of their publishing.
>> Right. >> Once again,
I think that's a logical construct.
They don't feel like they're being evil when they're offering the 360 deal.
They have a life that they need to support, but
also they're seeing the traditional world start to erode from under them and
then there's a powerful fear that in terms of making this relationships.
One time, I was actually here at Vanderbilt University and
I was attending, there was a form with the of the tight ends of industry and
they were taking questions from the audience in written form.
And I wrote a question that essentially said,
given the state of declining revenues and
given the fragmentation of media and how many more mediums there
are to have a conversation through about your artist work.
Basically, more people in a state of lower revenues.
Have any of you taken a pay cut to help pay for
more infrastructure and there was this long silence.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
then one of them laid into the mic and just said, no.
>> [LAUGH] >> And there was a lot of laughter and
he said- >> It's not funny, but it's funny.
>> But he said, well, he was making a joke, but he was like, but
a lot of our compensation is based on bonuses.
So in fact, we have, in a manner of speaking,
have taken a pay cut, which was kind of like maybe.
But there's this sense of where these people have lives and
they can only sort of tear down the the monolith so
much before it really sort of wrecks their lives or causes them.
So I mean it, I'm in a competitive environment.
I've created a company to go compete out there.
So really the thing is that I wanted to and
want to continue to build a business where all these things,
because the thing that people care about is the artist and their expression.
That's the thing that matters the most.
And if we can be of service to them by, once again, negating the nos.
Ownership of your work, be my guest.
Transparent accounting, that's fair and participation in the conversation
around how your record's going to get marketed and we're going to be
out there working on the plan that we construct together, check.
It's just removing the impediments to inviting them into a better environment.
We don't take any of their road sales.
We don't take any of their web sales.
We don't take any of their master use license money,
because it's their recording.
They are literally their own label.
We are their humble servants.
>> [LAUGH] >> So, and
it's a more attractive environment.
And so if we create a more attractive environment, we're going to get the gig,
we're going to get the job.
>> I'm glad that you mentioned the radio a minute ago,
because I imagine that's one of the challenges for you.
What would you say to get your artists mainstream radio airplay,
because it's so expensive to promote artists on the radio.
What would you say to somebody that says that,
hat's great what you're doing, but it still takes the clout and
the relationships of major record label to create a superstar,
because it takes our clout and money to get people on mainstream radio.
>> Well, I think there's a certain amount of validity to that, but
I think you look at somebody like Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.
And they created their own momentum and then they wound
up partnering with Warner without giving up ownership of their work.
They cut Warner into a significant portion, but they didn't give up
control over their work and it was more dictated on their terms.
And obviously, Warner felt like it was in their best interest to help and
get some of what was going to be an enormous record-
>> Right.
>> Rather than none of it.
And also, I think it just really depends on the business that you're in.
I mean, we just recently started a commercial country business.
Now it did alter the rates that we charge, just because we had to charge more in
deference to the fact that it's a much bigger enterprise to keep relationships
up with in this particular instance, we're doing commercial country.
And so there's a lot more infrastructure cost, so
we had to alter our value proposition in order to do that, but not greatly.
I mean, we're not taking ownership of the work, we're not doing any of that, and
honestly it's up to us to prove as to whether we can make this work.
We have been involved in some successful commercial country records.
We wound up losing those acts and we also let our contracts are so
open that an artist can go basically at their will.
And it got to the point with those artists where we developed them to the point and
they were getting a lot of radio play, but they felt like they needed a more
consistent infrastructure around them to be able to deal with that and so
we wound up.
>> Right.
Losing those artists, but everybody needs to be where they're best served.
And so I don't love it, but
I let it happen just because that's the loving thing to do.
I want everybody to have the best career that they can have.
But creating the commercial country
staff was an effort to not lose those artists as we developed them.
Because I do feel like we have a facility for recognizing and
developing acts in every other way except for you know radio heretofore.
So we'll see how this works but I'm eternally optimistic and feel like
we have a really sound philosophical You know underpinning and how we approach it.
We do it probably with a little lighter footprint financially in
terms of how we do it.
But we don't need to go down that rabbit hole now.
because so many other things to talk about, you know, so.
>> A cultural environment where a lot of consumers expect music for free, or
close to free.
What is it that you guys are able to do to convince a person to step over into
the I'm going to shell out my hard-earned dollars for this?
Like, what do you think pushes a consumer over to the,
that's an artist I want to spend money on.
>> Well, you know, one of our core values at Thirty Tigers is a deep and
abiding dedication to the idea of narrative.
Every creative work has an emotional valance to that work.
And that is the real utility of the core, that is the thing
above all else that has utility in this entire relationship.
And people have different relationships depending on any number of factors.
People either, if you're younger, you may identify who
you are in the social order by the music that you consume.
If you're perhaps a little bit older, you find catharsis and
companionship in the artistry of another artist.
And so sort of understanding what the emotional valance of that work is and
who's going to be, who this music is going to resonate to.
And then resonate with, and then how you form the conversation,
and we really try to think about the entire, because between the creator and
the consumer, the idea of that artist's work transmits through several mediums.
There's traditional journalism, there's radio,
there's social media, there's word of mouth.
>> Right.
>> There's the live environment, of course, which is hugely important.
And so, being able to think about how you stay on message,
and how you support the narrative in every one of those environments.
This is just back into, just marketing 101 stuff.
So if you're throwing a very confusing message out there.
One of the things that, it's like we'll talk to artists and
about this sometimes, we'll talk to them about their work and they'll come in and
they'll be like, this album is very diverse, got a reggae song in here got a,
you know, it's just like, to me that is not a plus.
When you're conveying an idea to somebody,
there has to be a sense of at the core and really over the whole body of work.
What is the emotional valance of this work and how do we talk about it.
And not only how do we talk about it, but
then finding practitioners through the various trades,
through radio, through PR that are trusted advocates.
I have friends that if they tell me that they loved a movie,
it's like, I love them as human being,
but obviously I don't trust their taste in movies.
>> [LAUGH] >> But
I have certain other friends if they tell me that they loved a movie,
it was like, man, I gotta go check that out because I trust them.
And it's that way with PR people, with radio promotion people.
So it's not just the narrative around the emotional valance of the work but
it's the constructing a team of trusted advocates so
that when that person calls NPR it's like I've got a great story for you to tell.
>> Right. >> Then they're like,
I want to talk to you about this.
>> You know that they're being authentic about this enthusiasm.
[CROSSTALK] >> Yeah, and because most of the PR people
that we value will tell me no as often as they'll tell me yes.
And we have a good relationship, so
that if their not feeling what I'm feeling then they'll say so.
And I think that's really important.
But you take all the various, sort of,
threads of how that narrative plays out and then you organize them in a process
which is kind of one of the skill sets that I came out of Arista with.
Because that's just a truism of marketing or
any Idea that you're trying to disseminate.
Whether it's based around a product or
whether it's based around a political idea or anything like that.
It takes repeated exposure to that impression
before people get the idea of what it is that you're trying to convey.
David Ogilvie, who's sort of the dean of modern advertising, said that it's seven
impressions before people became aware of what you were trying to tell them.
And even before that, PT Barnum, I was reading a book about an old
vaudeville artist, and PT Barnum figured into that.
And he said the same thing, it took seven Impressions before anybody became aware.
And so whether it's seven or I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the stickiness.
But the point is it takes multiple impressions before anybody, and
if you think about it anecdotally in your
own consumption you know that that's essentially true.
When you hear about a band or you hear about an idea or
something like that, you're introduced to that idea and it sticks with you and, but
it generally takes a little bit more.
And so to be able to, in terms of music, reading about it in a magazine,
hearing it about it from a friend, hearing about it on the radio, and all of a sudden
you're kind of like, I really like that, I'm going to go get that.
So that's the environment that we have to create, but it takes facility
with each of those mediums and also organizing it so that it's all happening
within a reasonably compressed time period for it to work.
And so I feel like that's what we're really good at.
>> That makes a lot of sense, and I wonder whether you think that,
it sounds like you think that those basic principles have not changed over time.
That maybe the marketplace is just more crowded, or there's sort of more
complicated plan that you've got to get together in order to make it all work.
>> Yeah, well, I mean the medium's changed.
When I started this company the idea of having
a strategy on Twitter wasn't even remotely.
You have to stay current.
I mean we have somebody that works in our company that's very technologically astute
and is very focused on developing technologies.
And we don't necessarily go chase every very nascent starting thing.
But when things start to really become in a way that
people really interact, like with social media.
I mean People sometimes treat social media like it's this other worldly thing,
and it's like, social media is a media like anything.
Media is basically anywhere where your eyes and ears are.
So sometimes when you're driving in the car,
you're listening to NPR and when you're talking to your friends or
your, but it's like social media is where a lot of people's eyes and ears are.
And so it's not other wordly.
It's not, it's just like you, but you have to sort of think about and
understand sort of the dynamics there, it's not scary.
You just have to know what you're doing and figure out how to try to have
a conversation through that particular medium you know.
>> I'd like to take a step back for a second and ask you,
I guess less about your sort of operations in your business.
But as you look at the music industry as a whole today,
what kinds of trends strike you the most?
What are you paying attention to in terms of the shifts that are happening now,
is there anything either exciting or just something like,
maybe I should keep an eye on that?
>> I think the thing that I'm thinking about the most right now is really
about where things are headed, and it's really more, I think,
and although we do thing about the, you know the sort of the framework
at which people get information and all that, like I was just talking about.
But really the thing that I think is probably more interesting to me and
I think is really important where I feel like we've, and we don't,
no one gets it right often.
But I do think that sort of sociologically it's like sort of where,
you know where are people heading.
Because I think a lot of what happens in music reflects the culture that
we're in and right now I've been thinking a lot about sort of our,
and I don't mean this to be a really critical thing.
I mean I'm using the word in more of the classical, psychological sense,
but there's a good bit of narcissism in our society, and
I think that a lot of that comes from our reaction of trying to identify
the self in the framework of this like massive change in technology.
And there's all of these mediums in which people have to.
And everybody wants to be seen, everybody wants to be loved.
Everybody wants to have human interaction.
And so the technology has just changed the way that that happens,
and I think that as a society we sort of mature into
knowing how to deal with technology, and I think as far as, you know, how the effect
of Twitter and things like Tinder and all this and that kinds of things.
I feel like it's created almost a sense of
people not knowing how to, or
people being, it's not afraid exactly, I'm trying to think, but it's trying to,
they're trying to find ways to say hey this who I am.
This is me. >> I exist.
>> You know what I mean?
I exist.
>> Mm-hm. >> And so often that takes the form
of especially given that youth culture often drives technological changes and
stuff like that.
You know, younger people are more adaptable to technology and
I feel like there's this sense of taking selfies and putting them out there.
A lot of that is driven, the media I think plays into that.
And I think the Kardashians and things like that are just,
they're reflective of people.
People I think sort of intuitively sort of understand and relate to that.
And that's why it's popular because they're trying to,
it's like they're trying to grapple with those same things in this technological
area that is just hard to keep up with.
But I do feel like we're going to mature in our relationship with technology.
And I feel like artists that we work with like Sturgill Simpson and
Jason Isbell, as people, those guys are incredibly cool, but
those artists are, they're really saying something.
There's a lot of spiritualism in Sturgill's work and
I think that people gravitate towards it.
[COUGH] Maybe even in ways that they don't even necessarily
understand why they're being drawn to it.
But I think, as human beings, we're drawn to the ideas
of love, of community, of real honest human connection, and
I think that art that will,
I think as the culture, people that
are in their 20s right now that are sort of identifying themselves and scrambling
to sort of find themselves through, in the midst of all this technological change.
They're going to mature, they're going to reach their 30s and 40s,
and I think that they're going to, and I think it's starting to happen,
they're going to want to find music that reflects that growing maturity.
And so finding artists and keeping my eye out for
artists that are really cool and incredibly gifted but
also where there's a real, and I don't mean this in a religious sense.
But I mean like there's a spiritual sort of component.
>> Yeah. >> You know what I mean?
So I think that that's you know I think about people like Clive Davis.
Clive Davis is right.
The 60s I think was largely a reaction
to the 50s which the 50s were a reaction to World War II.
Music reflects our culture just to sort of roll that back.
World War II was horrific and people, it was a trauma, it was a national trauma.
And in the 50s people came home and they just didn't want to be bothered,
they wanted to come home and be with their family and
watch this new thing called television.
And they didn't want to go deep, they didn't want to think deeply, and
I think things were very conservative and very, sort of,
they were an inch deep, and I think you think about television as a technology and
how that shaped our society, it caused people to stay home.
It caused people, it changed how people lived and
how they interacted with one another.
And so and then the 60s were a reaction
to that because at a certain point we're not satisfied with a lack of depth.
>> Right.
>> And so I feel like we're in an area right now where we're experiencing that
same sort of lack of depth and I feel like that always comes in waves.
So in terms of where I think that's going to mean for
music is that artists, I think, there's going to be more
substantive work that's going to find an audience.
And I think the music business as being of service to that is going to have to
deepen their committment and their facility for telling stories and
to really understanding the emotional core of an artist's work.
>> Right.
[MUSIC]
I want to I guess wrap things up by asking you a question that I'm asking all of
the people that I'm interviewing for this course actually.
Which is, what do you have to say to our learners about how
they can foster an environment in their home communities,
we have an international audience for this course, that is friendly towards music and
that helps to develop new talent and to foster great new art?
Well, I think thinking about the peeling
the onion back a couple of layers and
thinking about the emotional utility of the work in question.
And I think that a lot of times
with my company, I think people tend to focus on
sometimes on the business model and sort of think more macro.
Whereas I tend to focus on each artist and
think about this artist has a work that needs translation.
It need infrastructure and all that stuff.
And I think that if you're an artist, wherever you are in the world or
you're somebody in the service of that artist.
I think really digging in and
understanding the emotional utility of that work.
And then in your own community thinking about how you can make connections.
Or for that artist but really more
focusing on the art, think about of the specific individual artist.
I think in any solutions.
I mean, that's interesting to think about macro stuff and
I think that there's definitely value in that.
But the macro doesn't work if the micro doesn't.
Each artist is its own special experience, it's its own universe.
And I think that having that real dedication
whether it's an artist who's connecting with teens through YouTube.
There's an emotional valence there in a relationship,
whether it's somebody more like a Jason Isweld.
Who seeing things that are more spiritually girding for
people that perhaps have more experience in life.
Just think about how you connect that art with the people in your own community and
through the various mediums.
And I feel like you're going to build
relevance to the music community if that's what you're looking to do.
And relationship to it by serving it one artist at a time and getting it right.
And really also be discerning that the thing,
I have this sort of thing with both artists and people in the business.
It's kind of do you want to say something or you do want to be somebody?
And if you have the ambition to be somebody and
you're sort of thinking about it in terms of sort of.
If you're overlooking the relationship between artists and their consumers.
>> Mm-hm.
>> But you have the ambition to be an executive or to make a lot of money or
to do whatever it is that you want to do.
>> Right.
>> But you overlook the basic nature of the product that you're working with.
Which is art and emotional relationships, then you're not going to succeed.
So focus on the micro and the macro will work out.
>> Thank you so much.
We've been speaking today with David Macias who is the co-founder of
Thirty Tigers and a Grammy winning music producer.
Thank you so much for your time today.
>> My pleasure, I really enjoyed it.
>> Appreciate it. Thank you.
>> Thanks Jen.
[MUSIC]
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