David Chatfield, Founder and CEO of Harmony Records

Streaming promised unlimited music, but it also trained us to treat songs like disposable wallpaper. We sit down with Harmony Records founder and CEO David Chatfield to talk about what that shift costs artists and listeners, and why he thinks the next wave is about bringing music back to being an experience you choose, not noise that happens to you. 

David walks us through building a record label from the ground up, from the early 1980s world of $125,000 recording budgets and indie distribution to today’s reality of home studios, cheaper lockouts, and the brutal competition of constant new releases on Spotify. We dig into what actually holds up across every era: writing better songs, crafting memorable hooks, arranging music for records, and following through on promotion when things inevitably go sideways. 

Then we get practical about music marketing and artist development. David explains why a million streams can still mean nothing if you do not tour, how a small base of superfans can fund a real career through merch and direct support, and why physical media like CDs and vinyl is trending again when the packaging gives people something to hold, read, and keep. We also talk legacy artists, catalog revival, cinematic music videos, radio strategy, and thinking globally about where fans still buy records. 

If you got value from this conversation, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more artists and music fans can find the show. What part of today’s music business do you want us to tackle next?

Episode Links

• David Chatfield: https://davidblakechatfield.org/
• Harmony Records: https://harmonyrecordsmusic.com/

Transcript

Welcome And Meet David Chatfield

Jay Franze 0:31

And we are coming at you live. I am JayFranzi. And if you are new to this show, this is George Source for the latest news, reviews, and interviews. And if you'd like to comment, join in, or fire off any questions, please head over to JFranzy.com. All right, folks, tonight we have a very special guest with us. We have the founder and CEO of Harmony Records. Hailing from the great state of California, we have David Chatfield. David, my friend, thank you for joining.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Well, thank you for having me.

Jay Franze 1:02

All right. I got a lot of questions for you tonight, so I'm just going to go ahead and just jump right in. First and foremost, I want to know why. Why would you want to start a record label in the first place?

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Well, after law school, I was being mentored by managers in town, and one of them was Al Benetta. And he was displeased with record companies as I was. And he decided to start Oh Boy Records for John Prine and Steve Goodman. And I decided to do that myself and do Harmony Records. Started Harmony Records in about 1981. A year later, I joined up with another guy who owned a recording studio, and we started Sound Image Records, and it became a nationally distributed record company by all the independent distributors. We had the

Why Start A Record Label

SPEAKER_00 2:05

cover Billboard twice, and the very first independent record to be on heavy rotation on MTV.

Jay Franze 2:15

Nice. All right. Well, let's take it deeper. Music business, not an easy business to succeed in. I mean, we all know that from an artist point of view, but it's also the same for a business point of view. So when you're taking on the challenge of starting a record label, did you have an understanding of just how hard it was going to be?

SPEAKER_00 2:36

No. I had uh classes in the legal and practical aspects of uh the music business at USC from Don Passman. I took management classes at UCLA from the managers of the Jacksons. I took radio programming classes, I took promotion classes from Wolf and Riss Miller. I learned everything I could about the business, but nothing could prepare you for what happens in the music business.

Jay Franze 3:17

Right. I was just gonna say, and did it even compare. So when you you take all those classes, you you're trying to prepare yourself. So what's the first step? What is the first thing you do when you're putting a record label together?

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Well, what I did was when I was taking the classes and we were having these uh chapters, every time we had a chapter, I would just do what they said to do in the chapter. So I went out and I found a band, a band that had recorded in London at Abbey Road Studios with Ellen Parsons. Nice. I signed them and I took them to play live on the Sunset Strip. And then I was approached by some producers. We raised some money and we recorded records.

Jay Franze 4:11

So back in 1981, how much money was raised to put a record together at that time?

SPEAKER_00 4:17

$125,000.

Jay Franze 4:20

What a difference, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Yes. And uh I think Steel Breeze, when we did Steel Breeze, we raised about $130,000 because they wanted to come here and stay in apartments while they were recording. Of course, you know, we made double that when they got the record deal, and all their investors got their money back plus more right away.

Jay Franze 4:46

Which does not normally happen. So that's been pretty impressive.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

Well, you know, I was working with people who had golden platinum records, and we were working in top-notch studios. I had been a musician on the road, I had a uh music column in the USC Daily Trojan. So I kind of knew what a hit record was, and then later on I can explain how I learned how to make a hit record even bigger. Nice.

Jay Franze 5:23

When you first started putting the record label together, you said it was in 1981. How old were you at that time?

SPEAKER_00 5:30

I was 30.

Jay Franze 5:32

Okay, so you're still fairly young when you're putting it together. Did you approach it from a traditional business point of view? I mean, you said you were an attorney, so I would just wonder what the approach was like.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

The approach was I did it the way people did it in the 50s and 60s. And I modeled my record label as if I was the manager, arranger, agent, lawyer, everything for the for the artists. Because I it's like what the artist

Learning The Business Then Getting Surprised

SPEAKER_00 6:05

has to do today. They have to do all those jobs themselves. Right. And but back then I had to do all those jobs, and it was interesting. I was also negotiating contracts for artists with major labels, so I got to meet all the people in the major labels, and we hired them to work promotion for our companies. Very interesting.

Jay Franze 6:29

Nice. So you your connection was with the majors as far as promotion goes?

SPEAKER_00 6:35

My connection with the majors was that I had clients, legal clients, who were signed to major labels that I was representing as their lawyer, and I would get phone calls like, I'm here in St. Louis on the morning show, and there are no records in the record stores. And I'd have to get on the phone and call somebody at Curb Warner and say, Can you send a truck with some records there? And they brought them. So in order to make music work, to make the business work, you have to actually pay attention and do whatever's necessary. And that's what I do now, just like I did then.

Jay Franze 7:21

So you mentioned a model similar to the 50s where you're doing a little bit of everything. So as part of the label now, are you acting as development and management as well?

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Actually, currently I am working in development with other people. Sidney Alston is my director of AR. He has an article about him in uh Music Connection Today, it came out. He had a long and storied career in the music business. I have one of my consultants who works with me, is Ricky Schultz, who was the vice president of Universal Music, and he was a vice president of jazz promotion at Warner Brothers when I met him. And then Bob Conti, who produced Jose Feliciano's last two records, he also works for me. So I surround myself with professionals. I also have what's interesting is Billy Eckstein had a son named Ed, who was my friend back in the day when he was the president of Mercury and Polygram, and signed Vanessa Williams. So his son works for me as one of my uh administrative assistants. So I mean, I grew up in the business because both my parents were in the entertainment business. So I figured out that it really makes a difference if you surround yourself with people who are knowledgeable and specialists.

Jay Franze 9:01

It's funny. You mentioned the transition, the time from the 80s till now. And I feel like from the time when you started, things were generalists, and then it went into specialists, and then now it seems like it's going back into generalists. You went from the 80s when making records, like you mentioned, $125,000 budgets. That doesn't happen these days. Do you find that to be a challenge these days to have less of a budget and trying to make a record in a shorter period of time?

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Well, everybody seems to be making records at home, but I learned how to mix and master records and record them. And I am personally able to go, for example, I took John Stamos and his band, Destiny Forever, to AES recording studios in in uh Burbank and recorded the basic tracks and did the overdubs. And I funded the whole thing myself. And I have no idea how much I spent, probably less than $10,000 to record a number one record. It opened at the number one position on the Spotify local pulse chart in Los Angeles and stayed there for 11 weeks.

Jay Franze 10:24

Again, I mean it's very impressive. And it's impressive that if you think about what it you did back in the day with you know over $100,000, and now you're doing it with a tenth of that. So over that period of time, what kind of challenges do you feel you faced as the head of the label?

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Well, I think it probably makes

Funding Records And Chasing Hits

SPEAKER_00 10:45

sense if I just talk about from 2020 to now, because prior to that things were different. I attended Me Dem, which is the convention in Cayenne, France, and met all the presidents of all the record companies, and we discussed issues of the time, and everything was always changing. I knew things were going to be a problem when the head of Me Dem quit to go work for this company called Spotify that nobody knew anything about. And the head of all the agencies was going to join him and was telling us that streaming was the next big thing. And I'm at lunch, and they're starting auctioning the catalog of Columbia Records. So you knew there were big changes taking place and developing to the point where I went to YouTube University when it opened here in Los Angeles. I went and I graduated twice and learned all about how to do communication, collaborations, how social media works, and I invented virtual 360-degree videos so that people could get excited about something new and different. I also did the very first music video on an Apple phone that used slow motion. So I like to think of myself as an innovator, and innovation at this moment seems to be not innovation, it's recollection of what happened in the past. Because I think everything always goes around, and here we are. It's like 40 years it's spinning around that way because the you know, I had clients and worked with people in Denmark and Copenhagen, and then the generation got tired of listening to the same kind of music all the time, and they wanted to hear authentic, authentic artists, and then came Netflix playing 1980s music, and I had a lot of masters from 1980s, and I started to work on them. And what I mean work on them, I took them as if they were demos, and I put overdubs on them. I put the Beach Boys live act singers on as new backgrounds. I completely redid them, released them, and back there is a platinum number one record for uh a song that I recorded in 1982. I re-released last year. And it's You Don't Want Me Anymore by Steele Breeze, which has been, I think, it's charted every year since I acquired the the rights back in 2000. And coincidentally, I discovered the band with Kim Fowley, and we recorded the original recording in 1982. So there's a little connection there.

Jay Franze 14:26

You started by mentioning Spotify and the the way we listen to music these days. Do you feel like going to a streaming service hurt the industry as a whole? And do you think we're going back into physical medium today?

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Yeah, I think that in the beginning it was interesting because all of a sudden you could hear records that you couldn't find before. But after that occurred, and after the record companies stopped developing new acts in at the turn of the century because they were taking all their vinyl and putting them on CDs instead of developing artists. So now at this moment, with Spotify getting involved with AI, which is being rejected totally by fans. Fans do not like AI at all. When I do an AI video, it gets so many bad comments, so I don't do them.

Jay Franze 15:50

Swiping right.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Swiping over left, swiping, and that's what it's like. Instead

Doing Every Job For Artists

SPEAKER_00 15:55

of music being an experience and you getting familiar with an artist and learning to love music so that it could become the soundtrack of your life, instead, it's background music, it's elevator music, it's nothing until somebody does something about it. But that's only in the United States. Outside of the United States, physical product is doing f fairly well. In Japan, I think it's 60% of the income is from physical product.

Jay Franze 16:35

And is it any particular medium or is it just as a whole?

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Uh CDs, vinyl, DVDs. And in South Korea, it's cassettes. Amazing.

Jay Franze 16:52

Do you think there's a chance that here in the States we will go back to a physical medium?

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Absolutely. In fact, it's trending that way. Uh last week, Tony Van Zien, the president of Discmakers, said, you know, I sell a hundred thousand CDs every month to people who don't have CD players. So I am giving them away with my next records. They're gonna have a CD player if I have to pay for it.

Jay Franze 17:30

It's not just a CD player, that's a pretty cool-looking CD player.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Yeah, it is. And it works, it's got speakers on it, and it's connects to your headphones, your Bluetooth speakers, everything. It's got everything you need. The Chinese have made getting back into physical product so inexpensive. You can buy a record player for $29.95.

Jay Franze 17:56

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

And it actually sounds good. So it's all there. And what someone has to do is make people excited about the packaging so that somebody can hold something in their hands and then start to thumb through it and read and look at pictures, something that you can't get on Spotify. It's an to turn music back into an experience again. I'm trying to di to connect people in a disconnected world. And I think that as a result of attending my artist's live performances, afterwards, when I talk to the people who are looking to buy merch, they're asking me for physical product. And I'm an Amazon retailer now, and I'm going to be visiting my friends in Japan to work out some deals. And then I'm studying uh several other territories that are heavily heavily into physical. And I think that like the Macarena, it can start overseas and make its way over here.

Jay Franze 19:19

I appreciate the experience. And I feel like if I'm listening to something on Spotify, it's not like you described as an experience.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

And I don't I don't think it's going to, it's not gonna make it if somebody just throws things out there. I mean, I hired uh an editor from American Songwriter to write the liner notes. I have uh art directors who are putting together a 33-page booklet that has photos, descriptions by the artist of of each song, why what the motivation was, all the lyrics handwritten, photos of the artists when they recorded the song, and something that really is designed to be real pro and get people connected because it's it's at a higher level than just putting out a record and having something in the sleeve. It's more like what the Beatles collaboration records look like in Japan. That's what I'm using it as as a target is going to be bound. The booklet's gonna be bound with the record and the cover.

From Big Budgets To Home Studios

SPEAKER_00 20:35

And it's not gonna be that expensive because we're doing it like it's a paperback book with a record in the back.

Jay Franze 20:44

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

But if you can see, you can get this generation, all generations, to sit down sometime and spend two hours and watch a movie. Can't you get somebody to sit down and listen to a complete album? Right. I mean, why why can't you do that? I think you can. You just have to make it interesting enough. We talked last night at the performance of one of my artists about taking his videos and when he releases the CD, release a DVD as well. And he's saying to me, Well, I don't know if anybody has a DVD player, and I'm telling him, most of these people play their CDs on DVD players. So I don't think it's a problem. I think that everybody can always create in their minds problems, but I have never had envisioned any problems. I've always envisioned success and have always achieved success by just doing instead of talking about it. I mean, hardly anybody knows what I'm doing, but I'll Of a sudden, boom, I'm there on the charts, on a hundred charts right now around the world. My little record company. Yeah, but we we have good artists, you know. Jose Feliciano, we've got Ronnie Law's new record with Stevie Wonder, and Hubert Law's is on the new record that's coming along, Howard Hewitt from Shalomar. We've got so many different great players on it. It's like a jazz super album. See, I learned in the 80s when I managed the people who took the album cuts of a record and made them into singles. I learned what it took to do that and how to tell what a hit record was and how to make it golden. And all those people who did that with me are dead. So now I have this incredible gift of still being here and able to present a new audience with things that are good. And it's not just one genre, it's lots of different genres.

Jay Franze 23:16

All right. Well, what do you feel is the biggest difference in development from what you were doing back in the day to how you're handling things now?

SPEAKER_00 23:25

Um I think that it's way different with a legacy artist than it is with a new artist. But I'm still doing the same things with the new artists.

Jay Franze 23:38

Let's talk about both of those. I'm pretty interested in that. Let's start with the new artists. You get a brand new artist today. How would you handle it? What's the advice you give them, and can you kind of walk us through the path they would have to take?

SPEAKER_00 23:52

Well, um, if it's a new artist that's signed to my label, we go over their material. I have a rehearsal room upstairs above the recording studio. We can go through their music like we used to do in the old days at SIR Studios for a week and go through the material, arrange it as if it's going to be on a record instead of being a live performance, because those are two different types of things. And then I will go in and I will try to teach them how to create hooks and how to use hooks in their music. And I bring in other people to help them write and record. We do hear in about maybe a year what it would take a record company five years to do with an artist in the past. It doesn't take a year. We're already putting records out in six months. And then we do, you know, one single at a time on Spotify, Waterfall It, and by the time we're done, they have a million streams. And that doesn't mean anything, really, because unless you tour, I have one our one band, which is a Depeche Mode tribute band, that tours 50 weeks a year, plays two to three nights a week for the last 15 years. And I'm doing their first record. Can you believe how much of an opportunity they missed? It's selling their own. And they I even got them to write an original song. That was a strange idea to them. But you know, that's what you need to do to make money in the music business. Is I teach the artists, I say, you know, what do you like to do? And is there some way you can monetize that? You know, it's completely different than before. Before the record company would give you a $250,000 advance for a living and recording, and maybe if you got lucky, you got another record, otherwise you never saw any money again. Now, if you get a hundred super fans and they buy a hundred dollars worth of merch from you over the internet or on Amazon, or and they go and watch you play if you play once in a while, you have a career. You know, my goal is that every artist doesn't have to have a day job.

Jay Franze 26:34

In addition, you described the crafting of the songs, putting the songs together and then taking them in recording songs. Do you also handle the photography and the artwork and that type of stuff?

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Yes. Not me personally, always. I've gone on cruises to film music videos on a cruise ship for a song called Titanic. And you can imagine why. But, you know, I edited it, I put it out there, and it got half a million views and on a song that Sarah West wrote, and I love the song, and no, I couldn't get any known artists in town to do anything with it, so I

Streaming Fatigue AI Pushback Physical Return

SPEAKER_00 27:20

did it myself. But at the same time, I have a promotion department that does promotion to TikTok and buys ads on meta-ads and Google ads, and does whatever you need to do to get streaming. And streaming's and get it on podcasts. And the podcast world has changed since the French decided that people can't buy their way on a podcast anymore. It's now more real than it was. First few years, you know, you could buy a million streams, but now you have to have real music and real people. And so that's who I'm targeting all the time.

Jay Franze 28:07

Yeah, of course. So now let's transition to the the legacy artists. What's different in the process when you're dealing with a legacy artist?

SPEAKER_00 28:17

Well, the legacy artists um aren't doing too well because the record companies have all bought all the other record companies, so most of the uh record labels that the legacy artists were with don't exist anymore. And the record companies they don't really know who they owe money to. So they're almost in as bad a shape as the new artists are, except that they can go out and get $25,000 a night to play a show someplace. And with the legacy artists, I do um with most of my artists, I do a music video for every song, and most of the time use a pro-videographer director out of Kyiv, Ukraine. And we were even up for a Grammy uh last year, I think the year before, for Best Song for Social Change. There's an anti-war song called Is Our Love War, filmed the week that Russia bombed Ukraine, and the director's car was bombed during the filming. So it was incredible timing, is what the president of the recording academy told me. So it's just I do everything pro. Every video is like a mini-movie. Now it's starting to feel like the 70s, going from the psychedelic 60s to the 70s when it comes to music videos to try and get people's attention. The Japanese market, I'm told, and we just did this, we had to record our music video like it was on a VHS tape, so it would appeal to them. And so you have to keep your eye open to see what really is happening around the world so you can appeal to different audiences. And it's not just Hollywood, it's not America, it's all over the world where they where they buy records. Most people don't know that if you are a hit rock band in Germany, that you're going to be able to go on the tour in Germany for the rest of your life. Like my partner Jimmy Crichton was in Saga. They did, I don't know, 30 albums, toured there 30 years. They would go there, they would play all the festivals in Germany, sell out all the records, and make enough money to live on for the next year and record their next album, which would be a hit in Germany again. I mean, that's that's how you make fans. Yeah. And I don't I don't know how you make fans here, so I'm gonna go back and do it the old way. I'm gonna pretend like it's some new kind of a Marvel movie or something where you get people attached to the characters, or they're gonna get attached to the artist, and they're gonna learn what why is this artist singing this song? What are the words to the song, and pay attention? You know, become connected. The artist can be connected to the listener, and then the listener might actually be excited enough to share it with our friends, and then they can have a musical connection with another person. Wow, what a concept.

Jay Franze 32:05

So, how do you propose that we preserve the legacy of these artists?

SPEAKER_00 32:11

Well, uh Jose Feliciano, I'm taking some of his older recordings, I'm redoing them, and I am putting them out there and they're hits. And all of a sudden, he's playing at Coachella. And then Ronnie Law's, you know, I'm put out a record with him and Stevie Wonder, and he's on 100 rock charts. Oh, not rock charts, but record charts around the world in countries I never heard of. All of a sudden, his demand for live performance is increasing. What I'm doing by developing these artists and presenting them, presenting them to a new audience, all of a sudden it opens up their catalog. And all of a sudden, it's like in COVID when everybody had these reaction videos they watched, and they're going, oh my God, what does this ban Three Dark Night? I never heard of that. You know, then all of a sudden everybody started buying Three Dark Night records. Before that, the catalog was dead. So that's you know, that's what I'm doing. I I'm putting things out there, promoting them. I'm spending money on radio, you know, Ronnie Law's record. I got a great promotion guy. We've been on the billboard charts for eight weeks. And it's the old-fashioned way, except I'm not buying my way with, you know, a suitcase full of money at a radio station.

Jay Franze 33:46

Right. So you're you're not buying your way into the radio station in the way of the past. So how are you doing it now? You have to hire a team, so there is still money exchanging to buy a team. How does that team then get the songs on the radio?

SPEAKER_00 34:02

Well, they do what they always did. They talk to the music director. Sometimes I talk directly to the disc jockeys myself. One famous disc jockey who's been a little ill lately, Rodney uh Biggenheimer, who loves one of my artists. He thinks he's the new David Bowie, and he will play every record he makes and put them on a show and premiere the records, and it's really back to the consumer. And the consumer, I think, is tired of the emptiness and loneliness and isolation

Making Albums Feel Like An Experience

SPEAKER_00 34:46

that they have been left with, with this internet that was supposed to connect everybody easily, but has ended up disconnecting everyone.

Jay Franze 34:58

So let's just say if you were to to find a young artist that has talents but hasn't started their path in their career, what kind of advice and guidance would you give them and what steps would you push them towards?

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Well, uh everyone needs to hone their skills. I mean, brand new artists, they don't know much about anything because all they're doing is watching YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and the record companies got burned really quickly by signing TikTok artists because they had no follow-up. They need to learn how to be an artist. I mean, an artist is a different type of person, and they have to develop a love of what they do, they have to be willing to devote the time involved, and then they need to, unfortunately now, they need to go on the internet every day and try and connect with the people who are their followers, because that's expected of them. But they're going to get rewarded from that if they put out some good product. It's just that right now, you know, what are they going to get? A 20-second snippet on a social media page, or, you know, they're gonna they're gonna try and find their artists on Spotify, but there's a hundred and five thousand new artists releasing a song a day. I mean, really? How are you gonna get discovered that way? Right. You know, I mean, John Stamo said to me, what does it mean? Is it does it matter that we're number one in Los Angeles on the on the chart? And I said, Well, Beyoncé's number three, and uh Snoop Dogg is number seven. I think you're doing okay. But you know, he had articles in People Magazine, he was doing a book tour, he was there, social media, getting his name out there. You know, now he's with the Beach Boys. Yeah, and it's it's really not any different than it was at the beginning of music because people don't realize that before the 70s, really before the late 60s, the artists didn't make that much money. You know, they didn't make millions of dollars from one record, it just didn't happen. But all of a sudden, this happened for 20, 30 years, and people now expect that, but that's not the way it is. You're lucky if you can get a thousand people who are in your fan club who buy merchandise. You but you're lucky to sell out a 2,500-seater. It's a different business.

Jay Franze 37:50

Well, from your experience over the years, you've seen and you've participated in the world of management. How has management changed from when you started to now?

SPEAKER_00 38:02

Well, how it's changed is that a lot more people are unmanageable. Everybody thinks they know way more than they actually do. And there's so much bad information that's coming out on the internet from people who are just there to make money. It's almost like there are so many scam artists out there that because there's so little money in new artists, you can't get an established manager. You're ending up with managers that don't know what they're doing, and you're both learning at the same time, and it must be really hard for a new artist to get anywhere. So, again, we default back to the song. If you have a great song, Mars Bonfire saying Born to Be Wild in his bathtub, and it that's how he sold the song. You know, it's it's not any different. The song is the thing, and so you have to bang that into the kids' heads. Write, write, write, write songs, a hundred songs if you have to, and listen to music. You know, music is a derivative art, and find something you like, find the type of music you want to do, and then do the best job you can in creating your own persona, both musically and image-wise, because your image is important these days.

Jay Franze 39:42

So what would the primary role of a manager be in today's market?

SPEAKER_00 39:50

The primary role of a manager in today's market is trying to connect artists with producers, you know, the people who have their home studios that are going in and they're helping the artists write music. Most of the new artists I know are not recording their own music. They're going to these guys who write great songs and they're using their music to try to start out. You know, you're not in the British invasion anymore. You're back where you've got to find the songs. And if you don't have the tools to write your own material, you got to find something that works with you. So the the manager's job is to go out and find an audience

Building New Artists With Hooks Touring

SPEAKER_00 40:40

for the uh artist, to find a direction for the artist, to find a producer who is willing to work with the artists to develop their material if they have any, or come up with some way of getting some money to buy an interest in a song that they think is a hit. It's very, very difficult.

Jay Franze 41:06

Now you mentioned helping to find a producer for the artist. What you're describing is one type of producer. Over the years, there were other types of producers where you would take an artist into the studio, you would maybe hire the right team of people to put a project together, maybe find writers, find musicians, find the studio, and you're more of a director in that manner. But what you're kind of describing now is more of that producer who's hands-on and has the ability to write songs, and they're producing them most likely out of their home. So it's more of a extremely talented musician who can put things together in a production manner. Do you find that to be a better approach today?

SPEAKER_00 41:51

I think that's the only approach that's available unless you have a million dollars and are are willing to hire vocal coaches and all of these expensive producers, but I don't know how expensive producers are anymore because you know I have producers call me all the time and say, Hey, I want to produce a record with you. I heard your last record. And they want to make a little money. Plus, the prices went way down. Way down. Instead of spending $2,500 for a lockout for a studio, it's $250. Instead of paying $50 an hour or $100 an hour for an engineer, now they're lucky to get $25. Some get $20 an hour. So it's really a tough business for everyone. You know, the people who talk to me, I give everyone advice. Whether I think they're talented or not, I tell them the truth. I don't think people should be wasting their time if they have no talent. Their friends and family will tell them they're wonderful. They win some high school prize or something, but you know, uh, it's as I grew up, I discovered there's a way difference between a star and between someone who should be on Broadway or cabaret. That's to me, that's not the the music business. The music business is uh star driven and song driven, and it takes time and energy to develop someone to get them to that point. And at my record company, we have people here that help do that.

Jay Franze 43:58

You mentioned the Of the studio is going down tremendously at that. So do you find artists are going back into the studio to do a more traditional recording?

SPEAKER_00 44:11

Um are and some aren't, but I think that the trend is headed in that direction because of this desire of everyone from the person on the street to music supervisors that want authentic sounding music. They're tired of hearing the same old beats all the time, and it's just not real music. And in order to record in an organic way where you are listening to authentic music, you either have to use like an arranger keyboard by Yamaha that has samples of real instruments, or you got to go someplace that has real instruments. When we did the John Stamos record, we wanted a room with a real drum set because John really plays great drums. No one would know that, but he's a great drummer.

Jay Franze 45:18

And Beach Boys know that.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

And he wanted to have a window going from the control room to the studio so that he and the keyboard player could play off each other. And so I really think it's much better if you can do basic tracks in a room together so you can get a vibe and get a feel. You know, it's it's hard to do that if if you're just sending the music to one person, to the next person, to the next, to the next. And what kind of vibe are you gonna get?

Jay Franze 45:58

I think that's what I was kind of hinting around to back in the way records used to be produced versus the way they're being produced today. So maybe there is a chance that they're going back in the studios and maybe we will get some of that live playing back on records in the future here. Well, we do this thing here we call Unsung Heroes, where we take a moment to shine the light on somebody who's worked behind the scenes or somebody who may have supported you along the way. Do you have anybody that you'd like to shine a little light on?

SPEAKER_00 46:27

Um, I mean, I have all these great mentors. I mean, Seymour Stein,

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SPEAKER_00 46:35

at however old he was, took me under his arm and introduced me to people that I would never be able to meet before. And he, you know, would sign my groups to development deals. And this was just a few years ago, before he died. And then other people at Pure Music in London, Nigel, uh, who was the president of Pure Music, these people are are kind of like me, where they were giving back to me, you know, something to help me grow and develop because I think we never stopped growing and developing. And my music today, when I was working with Ellis Ectein, we were going over a mix and he was teaching me some things. So I I'm getting help and assistance from a lot of people. I got assistance from this one guy who's who is kind of uh it depends on whether you like him or not. This guy, Kim Fowley. Kim Foley taught me all the rules about what to do in a studio. He taught me how to write a song, and the first four albums I did with him all charted on Billboard. So he was a good uh, you know, a good mentor of sorts. And I had great alliances with people, great producers like Pat Reagan, and a lot of different producers came in and out of our studios when we were doing everybody from ACDC to Rick Springfield, and we were in the Sound City Center. Our studio was built by Keith Olson. Keith Olson was doing Fleetwood Neck next door, and we were doing the Scorpions. You know, when you're around this level of people, and I owe everything though to my environment growing up. I went to high school at Grant High School, which is nicknamed the rock and roll high school. The people who were in the pickup bands ended up being in Toto. And I always thought that I had to play to that level. And I thought that I had to produce to that level. So, you know, I have to thank the Terry Dan, who was the director of uh Jesus Christ Superstar, who let me patch my audition and go on a road as an 18-year-old. Oh well. It was really, I was lucky all the way along. And I developed this feeling that everything always works out for me, and I'm an eternal optimist.

Jay Franze 49:43

Well, we've done it. We have reached the top of the hour, which does mean we have reached the end of the show. And if you've enjoyed the show, please tell a friend. And if you have not, what the hell, tell two. You can reach out to both of us tonight over at jfranzi.com. We will be happy to keep this or any other conversation going for that matter. David, my friend, I cannot thank you enough for being here tonight. It has been an absolute blast, and I would like to leave the final words to you.

SPEAKER_00 50:07

Well, it's been great being on the show. Music is the soundtrack of everybody's life, whether they know it or not. Everywhere you go, you hear music in a restaurant, in a shopping mall, in a grocery store. Would life be without music? It would be flat.

Jay Franze 50:30

All right, folks. On that note, have a good night.