Step Into the Music

Jeff and I developed a relationship. He really invented as a strong word, but led the way into the new industry of legacy management. Prior to Jampol starting his company, Jampol Artist Management, most estates were managed by lawyers, right? And they were busy protecting rights, but not really growing the brands. And Jeff was mentored by a man named Danny Sugarman, who had been working with the Doors since he was 12 years old. And then when he grew up, was managing you know, the Doors in the nineties until his death in 2005. Jeff took over and Jeff realized that these icons were brands in a more traditional sense that could be grown and protected. And he went out and signed Janis Joplin, Rick James and Peter Tosh and really grew this legacy management business into this valuable asset class that inspired the Shamrocks and the KKRs and the Primary Waves to get into the business 10 years later. So when I left Rocket Science and I started the Spellbound Group, my first four clients were handling the social media content development and community management for the Doors, Janis Joplin, Rick James, and Peter Tosh.

And then in early 2011, the Michael Jackson Estate hired Jeff as a consultant and hired me to be the community manager. So I was actually the community manager for Michael Jackson’s estate for 10 years as well. But because my background was in management and boundaries are not my favorite thing, I kept offering sort of strategic ideas to Jeff beyond my role as the community manager on the social media content developer. And finally in 2016, he was like, why don’t you just come be a manager for me? And I said, okay, been waiting for you to ask. And I hired an amazing woman named Rose Campbell to run the Spellbound group full time. I jumped over and became a manager at Jampol Artist Management. And so all in all, I was on the Jampol Artist Management team, both as the community manager and then as the head of special projects and day-to-day on the Doors, Janis, the Ramones, Otis Redding, and several other artists, Jefferson Airplane, for 12 years.

And it was while we were there that we were looking for ways to authentically introduce our clients’ music to new audiences. And the general feeling is that you have five levers to pull to introduce an artist to the next generation. New releases, biopics, documentaries, musical theater, and books. And I went to Meow Wolf for the first time in early 2018 and thought to myself, there are narratives baked into every great album, not necessarily concept albums, but there are characters and there are stories and there are these world building endeavors that allow you to feel seen in the context of a song. And I wanted to build that for our artists, partly because the majority of an artist’s income at any level of their career is going to come from tickets and t-shirts, right? Especially now that streaming is a volume based game.

And at the time, vinyl hadn’t experienced the resurgence that it is now. And we were really looking for ways to generate more income and ensure that these artists’ legacies connected with the next generation. We didn’t have to do anything to the music, but present it in the right context, right? Because we know we have decades of evidence that when somebody hears Janis or somebody hears Otis, that song is going to move them. We just need to make sure they find it in a way that they’re open to hearing it as opposed to, that’s my mom’s music. Oh, that’s somebody else’s music. We want each generation to feel like it’s their own. And we thought building a Meow Wolf for music would be an incredible way to introduce fans on their own terms to these iconic albums and these iconic songs without trading on other people’s nostalgia and not as a replacement for any of those sort of like five leavers, but as a new form of revenue that would allow our clients at the time to get ticketing revenue without having the ability to tour and without necessarily trying to do holograms, or otherwise, you know, hint at everything they were as humans and as performers and shift some of the fervor onto the art. So that is how I first started. This was 2018. We started developing the idea, you know, and as managers, your job is to hire the right people to serve your clients. It’s not necessarily to do this stuff yourself. So I started going out and meeting people in the industry. In 2020, we had some conversations that we thought were going to allow our first experience to proceed to full development. Was around Janis Joplin’s and Big Brother and the holding company’s cheap thrills.

And then the pandemic hit and I left Jampol Artist Management to take a job as the SVP of Creative Marketing at Warner Music Global Catalog, but really Rhino Entertainment, which is US-based label and was there for the last five years and did some really interesting events and some really interesting digital experiences. And as my fiance and I like to say, I graduated in October and we decided it is time to really put our effort towards bringing music-based, location-based experiences to the forefront. And the market’s caught up with us. When we started talking about it, and we were trying to explain it to people mostly in the music industry, because that’s where our relationships were. We got a lot of blank stares or I don’t understand. And now we can, especially this year, we can point to House of Kong, can point to Radiohead Motion Picture House, we can point to what Billie Eilish did in 2019 to launch When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? And the lights have started to come on. We can point to Masquerade we can point to Phantom Peak. Everybody obviously defaults to ABBA, but most brands, for lack of a better term, are not gonna be able to sustain $150 million capex to produce. It’s incredible that it happened. It’s such a feat. And I’m so excited for that whole Pop House team.

We think there’s an opportunity for a more sustainable market based on IP in general, but also music-based IP that casts the fan in the world and gives them agency without interfering with whatever emotional relationship they might already have with music, and hopefully enhancing it, expanding it, and creating these opportunities for kids who have never heard these records to have their minds completely blown.

Yeah.

Well, I think trend-wise right now, we are seeing a return to album. Are seeing a return to narrative. We are seeing a return to an appreciation for the artist’s perspective. Raye just announced this week that her new album, This Music May Contain Hope, hit a billion streams. And I think that’s a huge endorsement for the album overall.

It’s led by the single, Where’s My Husband, you know, but there is a good consistent stream count across the board. And that’s just on Spotify, right? Like that doesn’t even take into account Apple Music, Qobuz, whatever, whatever. And a lot of younger generations are rejecting digital everything and screen everything. They are buying the records and yes a lot of kids are buying records and they do not have anything to listen to them on. But I think, you know, with entry level turntables that people are finding more, think that they’re using second generation turntables from their parents, from their grandparents. And it still indicates a desire to dive deeper into the world that the artist is building. Yeah, conventional wisdom is you want to focus on the artist and the artist brand.

I think our industry has missed an opportunity by heavily focusing on the artist brand over the art itself. And I think it is really dangerous for both the artists and the fans for a few reasons. One, it exhausts our artists because it demands a constant stream of content over art to serve the insatiable maw of the internet. And I think that we are making art disposable and commodified. And I think that is really unfortunate. I have been in situations when I was when I was working with artists who are still alive, where fan fervor is really scary. And I think that if we as an industry can help transfer some of that fervor back onto the art, you know, the way that I’m gonna get flack for saying this, but like most Harry Potter fans do not care about JK Rowling. And she’s a really problematic person.

But the world that she created in Harry Potter has done such a net good in the world. Are scientific studies that prove that kids who read the Harry Potter series grow up more empathetic and more inclusive and more accepting than kids who don’t, right? And is it the only book series to do that? No, but it is, you know, arguably the biggest. And I think it would be a net loss for society to cancel the wizarding world because J.K. Rowling is not a good person. And that applies even more to artists. The industry thrives on deifying these people, but at the end of the day, there are people that want to be able to create art. And Harry Styles has spoken to this, and Raye has spoken to this, and you’ve seen all of these stories throughout the years of artists just expressing this desire to create but not to be wholly consumed themselves by fans. And I think Beyonce does this really, really, really well. I’ve had some really compelling arguments with, or not compelling, but robust arguments with friends of mine who want more from Beyonce and they feel like she’s used the word inauthentic.

I’ve heard the word inaccessible. And I’m like, guys, why do we deserve anything from her besides what she wants to present as her artistic output? And I think that she has done a really wonderful job of creating this world that serves the fans that people feel really connected with, that people feel really seen inside, that people want to interact with and participate with without depleting herself and you know, she’s in control. She doesn’t have a manager. She is the CEO of, you know, Park Avenue or forget what her company is called, but you know, of, Beyonce enterprises or whatever. And I think that more artists deserve that. And I think that, you know, Steve Jobs always did a great job of saying, I’m not responding to the market, I’m giving the people what they don’t even know they want yet. And I think that we can do that because a lot of artists put out a lot of great albums, a lot of great collections of music. In the nineties, we had albums with a lot of filler. I’m not gonna, you know, I’m not gonna pretend like it was all great at the time, but I think we can create the environment where artists are delivering that, you know, and fans can dive into that and experience the world and we just have to set it up rather than reacting to streaming as the arbiter. I mean, not to go too much off course, but the fact that the streaming companies are the most powerful companies in the music industry is highly problematic for the whole industry, not to mention the products that we sell.

Yes. And by the way, I am a streaming subscriber. I love having the world of music at my fingertips, but I also buy vinyl. Also buy tickets. Know, there’s a whole flywheel that I think experiential based on music has an opportunity in. Again, you know, Radiohead doesn’t tour that often. So the fact that Motion Picture House can go on tour without them and people can step into the world that they created through Kid A and Amnesiac is magical and it serves band demand and it serves the band’s needs as people and as creators. That’s amazing.

And it gives you more opportunities to provide fans a point of entry. There is, to me, no greater communal experience than going to a live concert, right? And again, the artist is right there. You get to hear the songs. Your heartbeat is syncing with the people around you. And it’s just magical, right? And it’s expensive. And there’s billions of people that do not live near the major cities or the secondary or tertiary cities where tours go. So this could open up a whole new market at a more affordable price point, you know, for fans to have a point of entry for that live communal experience with other people around the art that may not get the opportunity to go to live shows or they can do this and then go to the show when it comes through town.

You know, it’s just, it’s an expansion of the market, not a substitution.

Absolutely. So the Living Album Experience is designed to allow fans to step into the world of their favorite albums. It’s designed to be a ticketed touring, multi-room, immersive experience. And I’m using the word immersive in the way that I want the experience to be dynamic and responsive to the people who are traversing through it so that every time they come, they can discover something new, they can hear something new, they can create a slightly different experience that is personalized and participatory while also keeping the artist’s vision sort of intact, right? So it’s the same mechanisms that like Roblox is providing for their online music experiences, but more focused on the narratives and the characters that are already baked in to the albums on the touch points that fans are familiar with. Like,

If we were to build, and we are not currently building this, but I’m just throwing it out there, you know, a living album experience on Duran Duran’s Rio, you know, they get to run through the jungle that is featured in the Hungry Like the Wolf video. They would get to be on the yacht that’s featured in the Rio video. So there would be those familiar touch points, and then they get to imagine themselves as the characters in those settings, right? And there’s a slight questing element, but obviously each one of these will be developed in partnership with the artists and their management or their rights holders. And so they’ll all be slightly different. But the general idea is that you have a beautiful spatially designed audio environment. You have a promenade style experience and you are traversing through the album in the order that the artist intended with opportunities to skip around once you understand why the sequencing happened in the way that it did. So that is what the Living Album experience will be. And no, we do not have an open yet. Yes, they are in development.

Do you want the honest answer?

I got laid off. I would love to say that I was brave enough to just say, all right, we’re going out on our own. But the truth is I loved my job at Warner and they announced $310 million or something like that in operational cuts and my salary was part of that.

Yeah, but that being said, was, you know, it’s a gift. And, you know, we joke about it because it’s, this was my first corporate rodeo. This was my first layoff situation. And I asked my boss, after he, told me that I was on the, that I was, I believe the words he used were I was elected for the reduction in force program. Yeah. Yeah. That was verbatim. And I was like, Wow, that is some spin. Yeah, but I had a really good relationship with them. I can prove the impact of the work that I did, but I like to keep learning. I always wanna perform my best and I asked him what he wishes I had done differently.

And at first he said he’d get back to me. And then a little bit later in the conversation, he said, you know what? Nothing. He goes, you did exactly what I brought in here to do. And I just can’t afford to keep you and make my numbers work. And I was like, and intellectually, you know, that layoffs are not related to performance, but emotionally.

It’s a really bizarre feeling to know that you can deliver on the promise of your position and still be found unneeded.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah to move on 100%. And that’s the other thing. I mean, I’m so grateful for the experience that I had there. I’m grateful for everything that I learned there. I got to work with, you know, bands and artists that I’ve been fans of my entire life. You know, it’s wonderful and I don’t belong in a corporate environment. You know?

Yeah, I mean, some people really know how to navigate that and stay within the lanes. I never excelled at that. And it feels also like that moment. Have you ever been skydiving?

Okay, so maybe the same. I love skydiving, but there’s this moment like you are all suited up. I’ve only been tandem. I do not have my skydiving license, but I’ve been five times. And you go up in the plane and you’re excited and you’re excited and you’re excited. And then the plane hits altitude, jumping altitude, and you go, what am I doing? I’m gonna stay here. I’m good, I’m good. I could die when I jump out of that plane for absolutely no reason right like if you’re putting your life on the line for something that will further humanity sure, but I’m doing this for Joel And you get to the door and you’re looking down and you’re going absolute nope nope and you’re like I chose this I like this and especially when it’s not your first time you’re like I love this feeling but your brain still goes What are you doing? And then your tandem pushes you out? And you have no choice but to lean into it. That’s what it felt like, right? Like fundamentally Warner was safe and it was good and it was cool. But since they pushed me out, you know, I’m so excited. I’m re-energized. I have had, you know, a lot more ideas. I see paths forward that aren’t sort of like clocking in, making sure everything’s set up for release, going on to the next one. And it is truly wonderful.

Yeah, it’s not that bad. You’ve got a lot of safeties. I’ve been developing relationships and studying the location-based experience industry for eight years. I have never been so prepared to do something in my life. And I know the people now. And again, the market’s ready, right? Another metaphor I use a lot is I started surfing during the pandemic and I am a really, really bad surfer, but I can catch waves now.

You know, I love it. It’s the best feeling in the world. And it’s all about positioning, all about positioning and timing and reading the waves and responding to the ocean. And, you know, that’s what the market’s doing. And it does feel like right now, we’re positioned to catch the wave at the right time in a way that we weren’t in 2018 or even in 2020.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s still really punk in a fun way, right? Like you’ve got a bunch of really creative, really visionary producers who are making really, really cool things. Like You Me Bum Bum Train or Sleep No More or some of these, The Nest is a great example that run the gamut of being shows made for two people that fundamentally do not have very much commercial value to hits like Sleep No More and Masquerade that were hugely expensive to produce and are on their way to making a lot of money to really incredible B2B experiences like Canva Create and all the beaches at Cannes Festival of Creativity, you know, that are a different business proposition to

Again, now we’re seeing really, really beautifully well done experiences in House of Kong, in Radiohead Motion Picture House, and ABBA Voyage. It’s kind of all over the place. ABBA Voyage, I know everybody calls it an immersive experience. To me, that’s a concert. It’s new technology to deliver a classic concert experience. And I think people are looking for play an opportunity. I think a lot of the early 2000s were more about passive consumption and people want to be engaged again and people want to co-create. I think the experiences industry is well positioned to deliver that in a really great narrative way that you can’t recreate at home. I think that’s the greatest opportunity for our industry is

You know, the Netflix is, you know, streaming platforms in general and YouTube more broadly have allowed good enough narrative consumption experiences, you know, that people are spending their time doing that it becomes a real question whether it is worth it to pay for something that is fundamentally the same experience. If you watch a movie in a theater or at home, right.

But you can’t get immersive experiences at home. You can’t play games like Bridge Command at home, you know, like, you know, where you’re really in it, where you’re getting it. You know, Disneyland used to be for the people. It used to be designed for middle-class families. And it too has become pretty out of reach for most people and families to go to regularly, let alone once, right? And I think there’s a real desire for those sorts of opportunities. So I think, you know, as...

Yeah, 100%. And on a macro level, also with the growing trends towards health and wellness, people don’t want to just go out to eat. They’re not drinking as much. They don’t want to sit still. You’re sitting still all day. You want to get out and get the wiggles out, move around, and expand your imagination. I think that there is only upside right now for this industry to really take off and serve a real need, both from a pure entertainment perspective and a broader societal perspective. I think it solves problems for real estate owners and developers now that there is more flexibility for at-home work, which by the way, there should be. A lot of these companies, I’m big believer in collaboration and I think that in person work is important, but I don’t think anybody needs to be in an office five times a week. And most companies that are requiring it are not seeing increases in productivity. So then you’ve got all these spaces and downtowns need people coming in to support the economies. So there are real macro challenges that this industry can fulfill and can serve. But

We need standards. We need standards in language. We need people to understand what they are buying a ticket for or what they are going to and how, you know, how that exchange is delivered. And I think right now, you know, the abuse of the word immersive is highly problematic for everybody because nobody knows the expectations to set. Then you end up disappointed, it ends up ruining, you know, things because everybody’s talking on the internet. So I think that that that’s part of it that and we need it, right? You know, that’s part of it as well. We need distribution, you know, regular distribution where people know when they’re going to the venue, what it is, what they’re getting, you know, what the value exchange is how much time to expect, how much interaction to expect. Just need, obviously you want these things to be creative and unique and wonderful, but the challenges of creative and unique and wonderful is it makes it harder to market and communications are important. If you want to separate people from their hard earned dollars, especially as we’re heading into a likely recession.

Yes. How long you’re going to be in there. Yeah, totally.

Yeah, and shout out to our good friends and partners at Brilliant Work because they actually have a really great taxonomy of the types of experiences, the types of venues and the types of guest flow that should be the initial parameters of discussion as producers and IP holders start to develop experiences. Yeah.

Yeah, inconsistent quality, a lack of clarity in conversations between producers and investors on what the expectations are on return. I think those are going to be the two biggest ones if we are not reaching the sort of one trillion projected industry. And again, like, because we have a better stratified, you know, right now we talk about the experience industry and you know, McKinsey publishes this report that says it’s going to be a trillion dollar industry by 2030, but that throws everything from F1 and the Superbowl together to stadium concerts, to small venue concerts, to location-based experiences. And I really do think that we need to separate them and be able to have economically sober conversations about the impact potentials and how we’re measuring return because the viewership of an F1 or of a televised opportunity, you know, like live sport or live concerts is infinitely scalable in a way that in real life human responsive, truly immersive experiences are not, you know, and how do we then treat the producers of those elements when the scalability may come from the narratives that they’re licensing, but the narratives remain solely with rights holders, even if they’re expanded and then repackaged as film, TV, books, graphic novels, et cetera, which, you know, I think it is the potential, you know, it’s, sort of like this reflective opportunity, but, the LBEs themselves are limited in scalability by design and that doesn’t reduce their value, but that does mean that funders need to understand what the potential is.

I just dive in. So I actually teach music industry 110, the music business now at UCLA. So I fortunately get to interact with students and people aspiring to be in the music industry all the time. And it’s so the biggest thing that I will say, if you want to be in either the location based experiences industry or the music industry is learn the rights, learn the rights learn the rights. It’s great to say, I’ve got this artist that has, you know, 500 million followers or whatever on, insert your platform of choice. But if you are not collecting revenue on the art that they are creating, you are not doing your job. You know, like, I’m sorry. And also it’s so important if you want to build experiences to understand how the rights landscape is laid out, particularly now that recorded music and publishing has become an asset class like any other commodity and those are changing hands all the time. You will lose a lot of money if you invest in development before you have an understanding of everybody that has to sign off because this is a very social pool, you know, and it’s very, very rarely going to be one rights holder for the sound recordings and one rights holder for the publishing. And you have to get permission from everybody.

Totally, especially as stuff is evolving, but you have to understand that all the new rights are built on top of and not in place of all the old rights. So understanding those fundamentals is really, important. And then navigating the newer classes of rights as they evolve is a huge opportunity.

Man. Okay, well, if we’re going on a right. Okay, there’s two people, I think, Neil Chakravarty, who is an investor based in Toronto that that is pivoting from traditional media rights to immersive rights and has some strong opinions about the of the industry as it is currently and how it could help grow up. So I think his voice in this conversation is really, really valuable, particularly to get a better understanding of how people with money and people who make money and people who make investments think about investing in different types. I think you probably heard, he was on a panel that I moderated at experience week and there are wild differences in perspectives on how money is deployed from venture capitalists versus private equity versus strategic investors versus angel investors. He comes at it from a private equity perspective. So I think he would be really valuable. And man, I got tons of people. Diana Williams, loved her. I loved her keynote about the flywheel about the rights flywheel and she built her career at Disney and Lucasfilm and whatever. So she comes from, you know, a hits-based perspective that’s really valuable for this industry. Vance Garrett built DiscOasis, which is one of my favorite experiences of all time. So he gets an up vote. I could go on and on. There are so many incredible, incredible, wonderful, creative people working in this industry, and you should talk to all of them.

Oh, and my good friend, the brilliant work, David Schulman.

Absolutely. Thank you. All right, we’ll talk soon. Thank you, Joe. Bye.