I mean, it was, '87 was really the end of the '80s.

Yeah.

I, you know what's funny is that I, uh, there were no arguments of having Aretha Franklin into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, mostly because there wasn't any social media to find out what our neighbor Bob has to say about that issue.

But realistically, I think a lot of the people who started the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, including Jann Wenner, who was a publisher and editor of Rolling Stone magazine, um, and various, you know, record label presidents and past, um, builders of the music industry as we knew it, um, completely understood that rock and roll essentially came from country music and blues music, and then rhythm and blues, and then that's how you got to rock and roll.

So yeah, even though that, you know, Aretha Franklin, you know, had a gazillion hits on the R&B charts, um, and the gospel charts, I, I don't think anybody made an argument whatsoever of inducting her into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Same thing with Ray Charles.

Nobody had an inkling that, you know, 40 years later there would be complaints about somebody like a Mariah Carey perhaps being in there, or Whitney Houston being in there.

I mean, imagine what pathways that Aretha Franklin carved for so many people.

But what else sticks out to you as kind of highlights from her career?

Yeah, I, I think part of it, um, when I think about Sass, she is absolutely part of that MuchMusic generation where when Tell Somebody, the song, came out in 1988, uh, MuchMusic played the video constantly.

And so she went from pretty much obscurity to being recognized everywhere almost overnight.

And that song hit top 15 in Canada, won the Juno Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist.

Um, and then a couple of years later, um, the album V- Racine came out, um, across North America.

Got signed to, um, um, to the big label in the US, and sold about a half a million copies worldwide, including 100,000 of them in C- in Canada, and Billboard named her the Top Female Artist of 1992.

The fact that we had the ability to all watch and listen and read the same things when we were younger kind of still blows my mind.

What was that like?

And it's so many hits.

Yeah, you know, in the late 1980s, there was something going on in radio where it's kind of known now, but a lot of the programmers, they just simply wouldn't play two women back-to-back.

And that was the era of, you know, five or six years where we got Sass Jordan and Celine Dion and Shania Twain and Alanis Morissette.

among so many others.

So when she started to break big, it was almost instantaneously.

Like when Tell Somebody came out on the Atlantic record label throughout North America back in 1988, much music and MTV played the video constantly.

So she went from relative obscurity to being recognized everywhere almost overnight.

And then the classic story of her turning the Foo Fighters onto Taylor Hawkins, her drummer.

I mean the chicken and the egg, right? Really of, of what did come out of the grunge, what came out of Seattle aside from the plat, but it really was like, it was a monstrous wave and it somehow connected somehow dark and these sort of nerdy non-social stars like they weren't they weren't stars right like they like we had seen stars before these were just people who made music i mean there was something that was wild and different about it uh even in 1991.

I talked to enough of those artists that were selling out arenas, and they all, to a T, said the same thing about that era.

That it was really weird coming from a world of writing about... alienation and anxiety and vulnerability and frustration without pretending to have all of the easy answers, suddenly you are playing to 25,000 people in an arena and everybody on earth wants to know what you're thinking about and how you feel about politics and how you feel about sociology and how you feel about all of those things.

And millions of listeners kind of felt understood by those songs that sounded honest rather than manufactured.

But you're exactly right.

Those artists that were put up there on stage had absolutely no idea that they could even do do something like that i think something like geffen originally thought that if nevermind had sold 250 000 copies it would have been a huge success for the band and the label it ended up selling 37 million copies I think their first manufacturing run was something around 33,000 copies, which at a time was selling that almost every single day.

So they just weren't prepared for it.

But at the same time, they kind of were doing it all along without really realizing it.

What do you think Swifties will think of it?

You know, it's interesting.

The life of a showgirl, in looking back at at least the media reviews, was probably one of the worst of her career.

It seemed like they kind of focused too much on the fact that the album was recorded during those off moments of her massive Heiress tour.

And it might have been a little bit undercooked.

It might have been happening a little bit too quick.

Some of the songs didn't really stick or land as much as at least the critics wanted them to.

What do you think?

It has displaced the Mariah Carey Christmas song, correct?

Yeah, it spent 23rd week at the number one position on the Billboard Hot 100, giving it the longest reign at the top since the chart began all the way back in 1958.

And no matter how many weeks she racks up, rest assured, Mariah Carey fans, I'm sure that Mariah Carey will have another couple of weeks in December.

But for now, this is the longest running number one hit in music history.

It's pretty remarkable given that it's a crossover hit too, no?

yeah and it's pretty remarkable considering that there are 160 000 new songs each and every single day being uploaded to spotify and more on youtube so it's remarkable that seemingly the music industry and country and pop music fans have all gathered around this one song for this huge period of time not only was it spotify's song of the summer along with billboard but this song came out It's pretty much like back in like January, February.

So it's taken some time to build, but this is what's happening now is that there are so many songs available for people to listen to.

And because we're not all watching and listening to the same things anymore.

that? What's the CD that they were saying? And what's a penny that you paid with a what?

No, they don't use any of that.

That's crazy to think.

But, you know, look, Columbia House, at its peak... you know, had something like 10% of the recorded music industry.

And the dirty little secret was, is that the record label didn't pay the artist a cent, a penny, even for their CDs, because they all marked it under promo because it was free advertising to them by putting their, the name of the artist and the album title in all those inserts in the TV guides and in every single magazine.

But, you know, when it first started, All those years ago, within a year by 1963, it had just under a million people signing up with 7 million albums sold.

So it just kept climbing from there.

I was mad and so mad that all these years later, I told Alan Frew that I wanted my thin red line tape back.

wheel?

Yeah, on the steering wheel and the gas pedal.

Probably no one.

You can certainly make a case, of course, for somebody like a John Bonham or Phil Collins or Cozzy Powell.

But realistically, I think the fact that he is no longer here, but the band is still going, puts a little bit more of a heavy weight on...

Neil's history and his influence, and not just as a drummer, but the way that he carried himself as a person.

There are a number of scenes in the brand new documentary that show Stuart Copeland of The Police, Danny Carey of the band Tool, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, each taking a part of Neil's punishing drum parts and attempting to play the song that made him one of the most technically demanding drummers rock has ever produced.

He was remarkable at the stuff he wrote.

Um, and it, I think people like that.

Yeah.

Um, the myth of Tupac is...

I mean, this isn't, this isn't settled by any means.

No matter what a court says, there will always be whispers out there on the streets of who they think really did it.

And when you're talking about music, when fact and fiction meet, most of the time publicists like for people to publish the fiction 'cause it's more exciting.

Um, you brought up Prince, who's an excellent point.

I mean, Michael J- Bob Marley is another one you're probably throwing that, right?

But Eddie Dalton's got an audience and there's a bunch like him, right? Like this is becoming more and more common every day.

Oh, yeah.

Deezer, which is a music streaming platform, they said last week that 44% of new songs they've received daily are AI-generated.

Apple Music came out last month and said that more than a third of their uploaded tracks are 100% AI.

And Spotify has already pulled 75 million AI tracks off of its platform.

This is not about one artist getting 8 million streams.

This is a much larger issue of not only are these artists 100% non-human, but they're being listened to by millions sometimes of bots in order to collect real money, taking real hard-earned money away from human artists.

But I mean, in terms of getting compensation, putting up guardrails, doing something to protect actual artists, is anything being done? And can anything be done, I guess, Eric?

What do you think about what she had to say there, Eric? Do you think she's got a point?

Yeah, absolutely.

She totally has a point.

But, you know, the scale of this problem is absolutely staggering.

One music streaming service is called Deezer, and they reported that 44% of all the new tracks updated daily are fully AI-generated.

That's 75,000 songs a day from one platform alone.

Spotify gets about 120,000 new songs a day, almost 35% of them online.

Would you change your opinion of the song?

She was more than a country music star, wasn't she?

Yeah, and especially because you kind of nailed it.

Depending on your age, you have such a different entry point to Dolly Parton forevermore.

If you're a little bit older than maybe you or I, maybe you remember her on the television joining Porter Wagner and becoming a duet star in the late 1960s in the era of Peace and Love in Woodstock.

Here they are performing, you know, real country music.

If you remember her in the 70s with those massive... amazing television appearances on the johnny carson show or on laughing and the ability for her to do all those amazing duets with kenny rogers and so many other people that's what you love about dolly if you're in the 80s like me well it's all about nine to five and the best little whorehouse in texas And, you know, all those hits that we were having on the radio right across, whether it was country radio or pop or adult contemporary, Dolly was there.

And if you're a little bit younger, you probably just maybe remember her as the godmother to Miley Cyrus.

What are the songs that she will most be remembered for? She's got so many that, again, I know a few of the names, but immediately they come on the air, I know who that is.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah, look, she's not supposed to be here.

You know, when she was born 80 years ago in a very, very small town called Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center in Tennessee, she was the fourth of 12 children that was raised by a sharecropper father who was illiterate.

and a mother who used to just sing Appalachian folk songs to them just in order to ease the pain about how unbelievably poor that they were.

She began publicly singing at age six and then got her first guitar at eight, but that was supposed to be it.

You don't go from that place in Tennessee to the bright lights of Los Angeles or New York But, you know, she performed at the Grand Ole Opry at age 13.

And from then on in, I kind of don't believe in fate a whole lot.

And she, you know, she she took a political stance.

Right? I would say that's what it is.

He'd already sold millions of records.

He already starred in Juice and Poetic Justice and written poetry that university literature courses still teach today.

I worked at a company called Koch, which then went to Entertainment One, and we bought Death Row records.

My first, I think, five or six gold albums that we got after that were all like Tupac.

It was selling and selling and selling.

And the fact that all these years later, we're still talking about him, not only about the fact that he's something mythic about this human being that is still overshadows hip-hop and rap music and thus pop music.

proven yet.

What was your reaction when you heard about the death of Oliver Jones?

Look, I'm not a spiritual person.

I'm not a religious person.

But I absolutely firmly believe that Oliver Jones was put on this earth to play music.

I mean, from the time he was three years old, he can play songs from memory after hearing them once on the radio.

He was performing live in front of people at age five in the United Church.

He started playing in the clubs at nine years old.

How did you know America?

And yeah, like I said, that had a lot of people split in terms of whether or not it belonged in this show.

Yeah, what's amazing about it is that, I mean, let's just say it.

When you have an event with the Muppets, it automatically gets an A from me.

And then you just go up and down from there.

You start out literally at like an A. What's amazing about it is that the artists selected that were curated by Chris Martin of Coldplay were not only some of the biggest names in the world, but they each were representing a different country.

Madonna for the USA, BTS for South Korea, Bieber, obviously from Canada, Shakira from Colombia, and Burna Boy from Nigeria.

What's amazing about it is that Justin Bieber, even though that he did a ballad and And an acoustic one as that, he was the only one live singing.

Well, and that's what I was curious about from your perspective, right? How did this inaugural FIFA World Cup halftime show compare to its Super Bowl sibling? I mean, we're obviously waiting for the ratings, but Do you think that this is something we're going to be talking about, you know, weeks, maybe months from now, the way that we still kind of talk about the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show, whether you were a fan or not?

And, yeah, like I said, that had a lot of people split in terms of whether or not it belonged in this show.

Yeah, what's amazing about it is that, I mean, let's just say it.

When you have an event with the Muppets, it automatically gets an A from me.

And then you just go up and down from there.

You start out literally at like an A. What's amazing about it is that the artists selected that were curated by Chris Martin of Coldplay were not only some of the biggest names in the world, but they each were representing a different country.

Madonna for the USA, BTS for South Korea.

Bieber, obviously from Canada, Shakira from Colombia, and Burna Boy from Nigeria.

Well, and that's what I was curious about from your perspective, right? How did this inaugural FIFA World Cup halftime show compare to its Super Bowl sibling? I mean, we're obviously waiting for the ratings, but do you think that this is something we're going to be talking about, you know, weeks, maybe months from now, the way that we still kind of talk about the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show, whether you were a fan or not?

But Bonnie Tyler is the one who's passed.

Yeah.

And actually, you know, with somebody like her, because she's had a career since the mid 1970s, she actually did get her flowers.

Not only did she have those massive hits with Holding Out for a Hero and It's a Heartache and Total Eclipse of the Heart, but she did 18 albums.

And even though that, you know, a lot of people who know only those hits may not have ever heard of the other songs on those records, she did have top tens in Germany and France and Italy and the UK.

And sometimes it just doesn't translate.

But she did get an MBE in 2022 for her services to music and beyond the charts.

And in that little pocket was Meatloaf songs, Bonnie Tyler songs, and they crushed it.

Right.

Sometimes they bury it at the end of the album because they think it's, it's ...

They think so little about it.

Um, and for somebody that has 18 albums like Bonnie does, she will also probably tell you that there are songs on those 18 albums that she could have sworn were going to be absolute no-brainer hits.

Or it might have hit number 12 in Germany, but not in the UK, or it was a hit in Sweden, but not in America.

And sometimes just things don't hit because it's not the right time.

In fact, a couple of years ago she teamed up with David Guetta, who is a huge EDM electronic DJ, um, and they did a song called Together, and it's a track that uses the chorus of Total Eclipse of the Heart for a brand-new generation.

You know?

[laughs]

...

if it's not enough for artists to have worries like selling enough tickets or covering tour expenses and making a profit, they now are very, very concerned about their fan base not going to the bathroom before and during the show.

And yet, here we are.

Noah Kahan, um, kicked off the North American tour in Philadelphia, um, and also performed in Toronto, and found that there was a little bit of a PSA that nobody saw coming, but everybody can get behind, and that's you need to go to the bathroom, even if you need to leave the concert.

Because there were a couple of fans who didn't, went on the seats, and now this story has gone viral very, very quickly with, uh, possibly toilet paper companies, uh-

Well, you're about to, aren't you? [laughs]

Oh, I am.

people.

Hello, Mr. Springsteen.

Can you tell me a little bit about Mr. Davis who applied for a job in our mailroom? Astonishing, right? The...

He's number one on anybody's list of the greatest music executives of all time.

And even the people out there may not know the name Clive Davis.

They certainly know the artist that not only he found and not only did he sign to his various labels that he he was head of, whether it was Columbia Records or CBS or Arista, the label that he founded, and also J Records with Babyface and also Bad Boy Records with Puff Daddy.

But he nurtured them.

you're you're

so various reasons do they actually tell people saying hey nobody's coming to our concerts we've got a concert we've got to cancel this tour are they saying are they giving excuses

yeah you know i think since the beginning of time since live shows were announced um very very few artists will ever say I need to cancel the show because nobody's buying our tickets.

Meghan Trainor, who canceled her tour, said that she wants to spend more time with her family.

Post Malone wants to go back into the studio.

Zayn wants to make sure that his show is all ready to go before he actually goes out on tour.

The only artist that has actually said, we kind of overestimated the venue size and how many people wanted Tickets for us with the Pussycat Dolls from the UK even though that they're selling out mass stadiums in the UK They were having a little bit of problem selling tickets in North America but you know when you talk to Live Nation or AEG two of the biggest concert promoters in the world They say that this is kind of normal that normally you know cancellations are somewhere around four to five percent of all the shows and I think we're just seeing this a little bit more as because there's absolutely a huge amount of artists that are on tour right now because they know that they don't make that much money anymore on their music, on the recorded side, because of streaming services not paying as much as they used to be worth it.

And so now they're kind of concentrating on the live show in order to make their money.

So what's causing this blue dot fever for some artists? Do you think it's the saturation of concerts or do you think it's the high price of tickets?

And so you could see how that would be very scary for the labels because they're like, oh, these before we realize that these people might realize they can do it on their

own.

I remember my first real job in the music industry was working for a company called Koch.

And around the end of the summer is when I started.

And one of the guys at the label looked... right at me in the eye on my very first hour of working there.

And he said, it's over.

And he meant Napster.

I tried to play nice in the sandbox and I got screwed over it.

But they can make music my friend.

Yeah.

And it's not just in music.

You know, look at all the sequels that are coming out this summer in times of strange economies and the world on fire.

People tend to follow and fall back on what is familiar to them.

So this summer alone, we've got the Beach Boys headed up by Mike Love, who is 85 years old.

Bob Dylan just announced another slew of dates.

There might be a few of them out there, but even the guys that aren't 80, like you go down to the 60s and there's some great shows to be had.

So what is Spotify doing?

So when you go on Spotify and you are a regular subscriber or a premium subscriber, you've already probably seen the fact that they n- have listed your favorite artist's concert tours or shows near you in a venue search, and direct marketing support from the record labels and the booking agent for tours already.

They've done this for about 18 month now, and it's been driven about $1.5 billion worth of ticket sales for artists.

Well, now Spotify just announced this week, um, actually this morning, that, "Well, since we're already promoting everybody's shows, why don't we sell tickets? And the way that we are going to change the industry is we are going to decide," Spotify, "that these pairs of tickets that we are gonna put on hold for the fan is going to be based on your actual listening history, the amount of streams you have, your shares, your engagement with an artist over time." So it's not like a lottery where you're on Ticketmaster, and then you click in and you're, like, number 4,952, and you're like, "Wait a second.

How do they even come up with that?" Now Spotify has announced Reserve, and it's exactly what it sounds like.

They're gonna reserve seats for the hardcore fans.

I, I don't really care about her either way, but I go on Spotify and start pretending to be a big fan of Taylor Swift so that I can get tickets, which I will then sell at a profit

profitYeah, that's a really good question.