The Music Business Up Close: Takin A Walk with NYU Music Business Professor Larry Miller

Buzz Knight

Taking a walk with Buzz Knight.

Larry Miller

Hey, Buzz. Hey, Larry, what’s up? It’s great to be with you here in Washington Square Park on what is sort of an overcast but fortunately not raining day in really the heart of Greenwich Village. So we are right in the middle of New York University, NYU, and this is my 10th year at NYU. I’m a professor here, and I’m the head of the music business programs here. We have an undergraduate music business program where people get a bachelor of music degree with a concentration in music business. And we have a graduate program, a two year master’s program, and both of those programs graduate people who go out into the world and. Like. No kidding. Make a dent in the universe. In the music universe. Either as performers or as executives or as entrepreneurs. Even as educators. In every sort of music context that we can think of. Whether that’s a digital music service or a major or independent record company or music publisher. In the live music business. At the major talent agencies or at the live nations and AEGs of the world. In the performing rights organizations. At the digital music services. At every digital music service Spotify and Apple Music and Pandora and so on. And one of the super interesting things for me, there’s so much that’s interesting about what I get to do every day. But one of the most interesting things to me about this community in particular is how global it is, how totally international it is. About a third of our undergrad students are from outside the United States. The rest of them are from all over the country in our graduate program. About half of them are from outside the United States, and they are from everywhere. And so they come here to learn from us. I think I’ll share with you, don’t tell anybody that I and maybe some of my colleagues come here to learn from them, and I learned as much from them as they learned from us.

Buzz Knight

All right. I was opining, first of all, before I came to see you a little bit. I’m very grateful for my time. That was at the University of Dayton studying communications. So really no regrets to speak of. But my opinion came in the form that I was thinking, my God, if I knew of a Larry Miller at NYU when I was deciding places to go, I wish I had that consideration, because I was right down the road in Stamford, Connecticut. It was a hop, skip, and a jump. But anyway, that’s my opinion.

Larry Miller

Well, I was also a little baby radio DJ back then, as you were. By the way, did you work at WTUE back then? What was your day in radio? V-U-D?

Buzz Knight

Yeah, that was the university station. The radio station.

Larry Miller

All right. And look, when we were college age, Greenwich Village was a very different place than it is now. NYU was a vastly different place than it is today, and so was the music industry, and so were the ways that people who were musically inclined or musically interested or even musically obsessed got to interact with artists and the music industry proper. It feels like several eons ago.

Buzz Knight

Well, it might have been, but that’s okay. So did you meet Taylor Swift when she was at NYU’s graduation?

Larry Miller

First of all, everyone wants to know that. Yeah, the answer to that is no. NYU is a big place. It’s a school of 60,000 students and a bunch of different schools within the university. NYU commencement, the big commencement thing is at Yankee Stadium every year, at every noncovid year, that is. And as I think everyone on the Internet discovered, taylor was the graduation speaker at Commencement this year. And for one day, Taylor and NYU owned the Internet. But on that day, I was watching it on Zoom, not actually at Yankee Stadium, my home, I got to say, this year, but my academic program and my department are at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, where the music and Performing Arts professions department is a really big department within Steinhardt and really by itself the size of a 1600 person college. And the Steinhardt graduation is at Radio City. And that’s the place where we announced the names of all the graduates, and it’s our practice to seat the faculty on the stage and greet our students as they come across the stage. And so I was very glad to be back on the stage at Radio City this year in person to do Steinhardt graduation. So Yankee Stadium and Taylor. No. Radio City. Yes.

Buzz Knight

Batting fourth, Taylor.

Larry Miller

Taylor Swift.

Buzz Knight

Yes. So one of my favorite things about the podcast is meeting new folks, but also the reconnection with folks that you’ve known for a while. And as I was thinking about our history and there’s other people that I’ve interviewed on the podcast, the history is I can’t remember where it actually began, coincidentally. Do you know? Because I’ve got a few pockets of our history. But help me out.

Larry Miller

I’m going to guess it’s not a bad thing. I’m going to guess that. Well, should I say a year?

Buzz Knight

I don’t care.

Larry Miller

Okay. I think that the year was probably around 1984. I think the place was, at least in terms of the first time we’d met in person, was at I 95, W-R-K-I Brookfield, or whatever place you were, rock radio station in Connecticut. That I think you were the program director of that. And I was working at The Source, which was NBC’s rock radio network. And I think we met during that first year.

Buzz Knight

That sounds right. And then subsequently you went to some amazingly entrepreneurial places and independent places in your career, and we like talking about entrepreneurs and independence. What was after The Source for you ?

Larry Miller

So at the time, General Electric Company Shout out to GE have bought NBC from RCA, which was the company that founded NBC. And GE decided in the late eighty s to spin off the radio division. And I did a few other radio things. Some of them were more entrepreneurial than others. I ran a joint venture between Don Kirshner and an ad agency and we produced and distributed syndicated programming that radio stations would air. And my last daily job in radio was at a New York radio station. CD 101.9. The smooth jazz radio station at the time was owned by the Tribune Company. Before I went to NBC, I had originally come to New York to help start Z 100, the pop radio station that is still a pretty popular radio station as I understand it. But my last daily radio gig was at CD 101.9 in New York. And after that and actually before that ended, I had decided that I was missing something in my own educational toolkit. There was stuff that I wanted to know about that. I looked around and I noticed that certain other people whose career trajectories I admired had done some of those things. They’d either picked it up along the way in their early work experiences or they go to school for it.

Buzz Knight

Who are some of those people too?

Larry Miller

Okay, so I was really super lucky at NBC and I had a couple of great mentors. I mean really great mentors. And I always say to students today when they are looking for advice about internships, because of course, internships are, I’m going to say, an essential on ramp to working today. And not just the music industry, broadly defined, but in any business, I say, go hire yourself the best mentor that you can find, separate from whatever the name of the company looks like on your resume. Go find yourself the best mentor that you can get. And I was lucky. And I had a couple really early on. One of them was a guy named Randy Bongarten who was the president of NBC Radio. When I was there, we were talking one day and the conversation went something like, jeez, I see how much you love this radio stuff that we do. And he could see that I was sort of torn at that point between being talent and being on the business side. And he said, let me give you a word of advice. He had gone to Columbia Business School and he said, in not quite so many words, that there is stuff that you would get that you don’t currently have if you went to business school, whether it was Columbia or someplace else. And so, although I didn’t do it straight away, and maybe my trajectory might have looked a little different if I had, but some years later I took Randy’s advice and I went to Columbia. And when I think back at the transformative inflection points in my career and just in my life. I think about things like meeting my wife and the birth of my kids. But I also think about the year that I decided to run the New York Marathon based on no evidence that I could even run around the block, which I did once and only once, and it was amazing. The other was my decision to go to business school, which gave me a new lens through which to view the world. Now, I have many friends and colleagues in business school who were already working in sort of traditional finance kinds of roles in banking or in consulting. And many of them were there to kind of get their card punched. They were really there for the degree. Certainly I wanted the degree. But what I got was just a dramatically new, flexible, powerful way of thinking about fundamental things like risk and reward, measuring growth. And although I’ve taken a lot of bets in my life, in my career, some of them have worked out great, others of them have worked out less great. But I really got an understanding for myself about how to navigate in a world that is inherently risky, where there is no such thing as perfect information. And that, as much as anything else, is what I got from business school. But I digress.

Buzz Knight

But that was a super charging moment and I think if I’m hearing you correctly, it really fueled also you’re independent thinking about the way you looked at business and probably the world.

Larry Miller

It’s true. And my timing was good because I finished business school in 1994, which was at the beginning of the commercial internet. It was a time when major publications, when they were referring to the Internet, they spelled it with a capital I and they needed to explain what it was. The global network of networks, blah blah blah, blah blah, world Wide Web, blah blah, blah, blah blah. That’s when I was sort of coming on the scene. And when I came out of business school, I got a job working in a strategy consulting firm, as many people do, and we had a session soon after I got there. That was a planning meeting for how we were as a practice group going to attack the next year. And it was a room full of pretty smart people who I was working with, most of them much smarter than me. And somebody asked, well, who can leverage what we do? And maybe even know a couple of people in the music industry given that in there were some super early responsible experiments, having some well responsible, some less responsible that were at the time just about observing an understanding that given the limited bandwidth that there was in the world for people to access the internet, that it was possible to send sound over. This thing. You remember Progressive Networks, what Real networks was called before it was that you probably remember some of the earliest download experiments that happened at major labels, at independent labels, there were unsigned artists that were smashing out MP3’s and at least putting them out there as a form of promotion. Nothing was being monetized yet. And this was almost ten years before the introduction of the itunes Music Store, let alone Spotify. And so you could tell that if you had an advantage in understanding the technology. But even the vocabulary around the technology of music creation and distribution. That you might have a competitive advantage. Not just as a consultant in this space. But if you were a company. Like any record company or music publisher was. Or even broadcaster at that point. Who needed to get their own learning. Not just something that they read in a book or on a website someplace. But actually have tried some things and maybe had some successes and failures. And I still contend that you can learn from both, but from the failures. We tell students fail fast, but they’re all learnings. Yeah. And they’re all learning. In fact, when I think about my time in the radio business, I learned, and I’ll bet you did, too, from some of the very smartest and some of the very dumbest people I’ve ever, ever met.

Buzz Knight

Well, this is true. And the dumb ones I’ll probably leave out, and the smart ones we’re always willing to probably talk about.

Larry Miller

Yeah. And even name them.

Buzz Knight

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. The dumb ones I tend to leave out because I don’t know if it’s worthy of the bandwidth, but we can.

Larry Miller

Learn from them, too. Anyway, so I ended up getting hired by a client, and a client was AT and T Labs. And at the time AT and T had been broken up and what had been AT and T Bell Laboratories was split in half between what became Lucent, the equipment manufacturer, and what remained was AT and T. And much of AT and T Lab’s research, which retained many of the patents that AT and T had, was being newly reconstituted. And literally in my first week at, I met a guy named Howie Singer, who is still my friend, and in fact, he teaches with me now at NYU. And Howie had been really a lifer at AT  and T and had a bunch of patents, and he had a job in the labs that was really about sort of translating soft technology and helping turn it into products, into commercial products. And Howie and I met at a meeting, and we were sort of kindred spirits from the very beginning. And at this meeting how he had a device that he was showing everybody that was about the size of a shoe box. And it didn’t look like much. I mean, it looked like a sort of a HeathKit science project. If maybe you had one of those Heath it radios back as a kid from maybe when you were eight, or ten years old.

Buzz Knight

Well, my problem with it is I bought it already put together because I didn’t really know how to build with things like that. But yes. All right.

Larry Miller

So how each thing was built was built as a demonstration of technology that AT and T had to make super high quality music into a really small file. So it was a particular approach to audio compression, which today is part of AAC, one of the high bit audio compression formats that are used in much of the world. And many of the services that we don’t even think about today. It’s just part of the plumbing. But he had this device that would play music that didn’t go on a CD or any other kind of a shiny thing that spins. It sat on a PCMCIA card that was like the size of a business card, that had a bunch of chips in it, and a single card could hold one or two songs at the time. And he had built this portable reader that could play music that was on the solid state card, and you could shake it and still hear it, and it wouldn’t skip. Wow. And it sounded amazing. And it blew my mind. You had to have it blew my mind. I mean, if you were growing up in the age when we did, and we lived through various formats of music storage, music consumption, music purchase, we lived through all of it, right from radio to seven inch 45 and twelve inch 33, and a third rpm records, eight tracks, of course, the cassette time, and then the whole CD period. And we had disk mans that we walked around with, and we had cassette players in our cars. And you probably bet when you were in high school, I’ll bet you had an eight track player screwed into the bottom of your dashboard, possibly next to the FM converter. Yeah, next to the FM converter, too.

Buzz Knight

What relics.

Larry Miller

Yeah, it’s like the extent that we would go to to get music that sounded even marginally better than what came before it. And so I saw this device that Howie had, and I was all in, like, from that second. So Howie and I became partners in sort of a skunkworks science project that we got some money from AT and, T Labs, and the major music companies to develop. And that was called A2B At and T A2B music. Which was one of the forerunners of secure digital distribution of music on the internet. Which by I forget what year. Sometime in the late 90s. We spun the A2B music team out of AT and T Labs and merged it with another company that in those sort of heady internet one years. Where there were so many startups that were getting funded. Some of them were conducting more responsible experiments than others. One of those companies was a company called Reciprocal. Which you may remember. That provided a service for music companies and also movie companies and also book publishers that allowed for secure digital distribution of their stuff without being didactic about. Or without requiring a certain sort of rights framework or underlying technology for the way that the music was compressed. Or for the way that the rules were going to be embedded into that digital file describing how that music might be able to be shared. For example. Or resold. So we went to reciprocal, and a couple of years later Reciprocal was sold to Microsoft. And that was a really fun time. During that Reciprocal period, we were on track to go public in March of 2000 when the market crashed and the.com bubble burst in internet one. And not too long after that 9/11 happened. Right over there and right behind those buildings that we are looking at now is where the twin towers of the world trade center used to stick up. And I was in New York on that day, not here in Washington square, but close to here. And it is a day that we will never forget. And in the weeks and months after 9/11, I started looking for a music deal to either start with partners or invest in. I mean, it was a dark time in New York. The air was out of the sort of internet one balloon, sort of like web three is today. Maybe we’ll talk about that in a few minutes. And I thought at the time I was. I don’t know. Still in my thirty s. And so I was not a kid and I had spent my whole career in and around music. In radio and in music distribution technology. And as a consultant who was lucky enough to have a front row seat at much of the sort of transformative deal making that had happened around the consolidation of the music industry that sort of drove the formation of the companies that are today’s major music companies. And yet the thing that still motivated me was the music. And I thought maybe it’s time to put my money where my mouth is and see if I’m any good at that. Signing artists and songwriters and starting a company. So we started a company called OR Music, ORmusic, our distributor with Sony, and I was in business. We were signing artists and songwriters. I had a partner and I’ll tell you that the first three things that we put out were not exactly sensational hit records. It was funny. I remember there was a really smart guy who was working for Sony at the time for their distribution company, who looked at my business plan and he said, this is a really good financial model. He said, except that there’s a really good chance that you’re probably not going to sell an average of the equivalent of 25,000 albums per project. You’re probably going to sell less than that. And I said, really? What’s the lowest number that I should be forecasting? He said, well, on some projects, it’s possible to have to write off your whole investment and sell zero. Actually, there was a project that was one of our first two where I learned that you can actually sell less than zero copies. You can actually sell a negative number of records that you at the time, manufacturer and put out there because of the time, although we were still straddling the beginning of the digital music business.

Buzz Knight

But you and that venture did, I might say, do what most people never do, and that is you found the needle in a haystack with a hit.

Larry Miller

We did. We had a hit. So our first two records didn’t work out great. The third one was a Tower of Power record, which did about what we thought it would. Tower of power, of course, from Oakland, California. For me, the greatest funk band in the history of the world, still out there touring. Go see them if you ever get a chance. And that record did about what we thought it would, and that gave us a chance to breathe for a minute, and then we put out that needle in a haystack. And that was a band called LosLonely lonely boys, which was a band that we discovered or really was shopped to us in like the first week that we were open as a company. And at the time, los Lonely boys who were from actually they were from san angelo, texas. They are still managed today by the brilliant, fabulous, and honest and knowledgeable manager still based in austin, kevin womeck. And kevin at the time had lost only boys signed in a production deal to willie nelson’s company, and they had made a record that they were looking for a distribution deal on. So they were shopping what they thought was going to be just a finished record, get somebody to put it out. And we heard the record and we thought, there’s really something here, let’s go see them. So we called up kevin, and we were on a plane to austin the next day because they had a gig that night at a club that no longer exists in austin. It was a big club, actually, it was a laughably big club. We were there, and maybe eight other people were at this club. And Los Lonely Boys came out and they just tore the roof off. They played as if they were playing Madison square garden. It was, up until that time, the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my life. And they are three texas brothers, the garza brothers from san angelo. They have that tight vocal harmony, sort of like the everly brothers that only real brothers can have, and they could play like crazy. And in fact, henry garza, the guitar player, is in rolling stones, greatest rock guitar players of all time.

Buzz Knight

And the song in particular was the big one was heaven.

Larry Miller

Was heaven.

Buzz Knight

Yeah. I believe, by the way.

Larry Miller

At the.

Buzz Knight

Time, I was at Greater Media, and, well, I would be there in 2002, and they played the Earth Fest concert the WBOS put on somewhere, I would think, a few years after that. It was not at the moment of the hit. It was a little after that, but it was terrific, I’m sure.

Larry Miller

Still are.

Buzz Knight

Charismatic band. And just like you said, that tight knit.

Larry Miller

Hey. Hi, Michael. Say hi to Michael over there.

Buzz Knight

Hey, Michael. How are you?

Larry Miller

Yeah, later.

Buzz Knight

He’s on the phone. We’re recording a podcast.

Larry Miller

Michael Dorf is my friend who is the owner of City Winery.

Buzz Knight

Oh, yeah.

Larry Miller

All the City Wineries.

Buzz Knight

Yeah.

Larry Miller

There you go.

Buzz Knight

I love that.

Larry Miller

Anyway, the thing about Los Lonely Boys, it sure was great having a multi million selling hit record, but we’re also the publisher of Los Lonely Boys, and we came down the learning curve on publishing very fast. And I’ve been a little bit obsessed about music rights and about publishing in particular ever since.

Buzz Knight

Well, yeah, and I’m glad that you did that beautiful transition to that topic. So I have a number of things, state of the state I’d love to have you speak about. First of all, speak about the state of rights when it comes to publishing, when it comes to what’s going on, certainly between radio and, you know, what’s the face of this right now as you look at it. I know that’s a deep one, but how do you grade it?

Larry Miller

Okay, so let’s do radio and the publishers, and then let’s do radio and the record companies. Fair. All right, first, let’s start with how songwriters get paid in the United States. It’s a little different in other territories around the world. If you’re a songwriter who is not a performer as well, then you write songs either by yourself or with others, and other people record your songs and put them out. Every song that you hear on the radio, on the internet, or in any other mode of music discovery and listening that there is with or without video, has two different copyrights in it. There’s the copyright in the sound recording of the song that makes sense, and that’s pretty easy to wrap your head around. And usually in the United States, the copyright in the sound recording of the song is the province of the record company. Or if it is a self financed independent performer who might also be a writer, they can own that copyright. And the sound recording certainly separate from the copyright in the sound recording of the song. There’s the copyright in the song itself, the underlying musical composition, the copyright, and the underlying musical composition, the song itself. In US. Law and then the laws of other countries, over 160 countries around the world is old, and it’s codified. And if you think about it, there was a sheet music business long before there was a sound recording business. And most people, when they think about the music publishing business, if you’re a civilian, if I say music publishing, you might think, oh, you mean the sheet music that was in the piano bench that we had in the house when we were growing up. That’s music publishing, right? And the answer is, and my response is yes, that is a form of music publishing. But today sheet music revenue for music publishers and songwriters is under 1% of the revenue that they get. So let’s talk about the other 99% of the revenue that songwriters and music publishers get. So when a song is created, yes, I mean, you can make a print version of it, but you can license the song for recording and for distribution. And those particular rights are usually embedded in what is today called a mechanical royalty, which is not something that concerns radio, much of radio, at least Am FM radio, but it very much does concern digital music services, the mechanical right. And maybe we can come back to that in a minute. Then there is the right to public performance and that is the right to license the entities, including all of radio, who want to publicly perform and transmit that underlying musical composition that of course, when you hear it on the radio was embedded with the sound recording is so far we’ve talked about the mechanical right and we’ve talked about the public performance right. And the third major segment of revenue for songwriters and music publishers is sync or synchronization, which some of your listeners may have heard of. And you might imagine that there is a separate right that is not statutory. In other words, there is no law describing how much a user would have to pay or how much a writer or publisher would get paid for using a piece of music in fixed time synchronized to a TV show or a movie or an ad. So anytime music is in a movie or a TV show or even a YouTube video, there needs to be a sync license on the one hand to allow the producers of the thing to synchronize that song into their movie or TV show or whatever it is. And then separately, when that thing is played in, say, movie theaters around the world outside the United States, or played on television or cable or streamed by Netflix or anybody else, there is a public performance right and royalty that accrued their benefit as well. So we’ve talked about mechanicals, we’ve talked about public performance, which is not just for radio, but also for TV and to some extent digital music services. We’ve talked about synchronous, synchronization, and we’ve even touched on sheet music, which I sort of put into the bucket called Other right. Other, by the way, might also contain stuff like if you ever opened up a greeting card and a little dinky sounding melody of the song started playing, they. Need a license for that too from the music publisher on behalf of the songwriter. So that’s publishing, when a record company uses a song, they need to pay the publisher and the songwriter a mechanical royalty for the use of that song in the sound recording that they are about to make or have made but before they release it. It’s called a mechanical, by the way, because in the years immediately before the music publishers in the United States and in UK and throughout Europe were all up in arms because there was a growing middle class and one of the sort of aspirational things to have as a middle class family was a piano. And player pianos were a fantastic thing to have and so player pianos were proliferating. And the things that you need to make a player piano play were piano roles, songs that were mechanically etched into a player piano roll. This is separate from the wax cylinders that were the earliest days of sound recording. But you needed this mechanical thing in order for your player panel to work. And what was happening was that there were a large number of, let’s just say, unethical business people who were using music that wasn’t theirs in creating player piano roles and selling them without a license and in the copyright act of when the mechanical license and the mechanical right was first codified in US. Copyright law soon thereafter, of course, you needed to have record companies pay a mechanical rate for the use of the song and making a sound recording of that song. This is sort of a long way to go to talk about the world that we have inherited today when it comes to the understanding and even explanation of music rights. Because the fact is, if we were inventing the business for the business that exists today, it would never look the way that it looks right now. Like, not in a million years, right? But you asked about radio and publishing and radio and the record business. And so I will tell you that it might surprise at least some of your listeners that when commercial radio in the United States or noncommercial radio plays a piece of music that you hear that songwriters and music publishers get paid something. And maybe you’ve heard of the performing rights organizations ASCAP and BMI and CSAC and there’s another company called Global Music Rights that operates now in the United States that license music on behalf of publishers and songwriters to the radio industry so that radio stations can play pretty much whatever they want if they have a blanket license from those performing rights organizations. And the writers and songwriters get paid. But the United States is the only country on earth with advanced intellectual property laws that has an exemption for the sound recording, which is maybe a too technical way of saying and record companies and performers get nothing. Absolutely zero. So writers and publishers get paid from radio performance. It’s a very, very small, low, single digit percentage of revenue that radio stations get and a very small fixed fee for non commercial stations. But record companies and performers get zero. And of course, there is new legislation underway that will hopefully remedy that. And I know it wouldn’t surprise you, Buzz, but it wouldn’t surprise, I don’t think, even a casual listener, that the broadcaster’s lobby has been virulently against changing the exemption because in all likelihood, at least in their view, it would cost them more than they are currently paying for the music that they play. By the way, if you were to just a quick aside here on this point. Businesses have, in accounting terms, a cost of goods sold, right? It costs something to make the products that we buy and the services that we consume. Radio’s cost of goods sold is not zero, but it is lower than literally any other business that you can think of. It’s lower than the software business, it’s lower than the chemicals business, it’s lower than the pharmaceutical business, it’s lower than pretty much anything. Now, radio certainly has other costs, right? Rent, payroll, stuff like that. But radio pays almost nothing for the music that it plays. They do pay songwriters, music publishers. They do not pay anything in the United States. The world’s largest radio market and the world’s largest music market for the music that they play. And I hope that I live long enough to see that change. It has been a jihad of mine for my entire working life. That just struck me as being inherently unfair that maybe when you and I were very young and the record industry was just printing money from the vinyl business and the CD business, that they didn’t care so much about then, about necessarily getting paid. But they sure do now, especially now that radio’s influence has waned in the way that I believe it has. I don’t know if what you’re feeling how do you feel about that?

Buzz Knight

There’s no doubt that it’s waned. It still means a lot when it comes to certain great brands. You mentioned Z 100 earlier. Yeah, and there’s others. But then when you get to midpack and below, it’s incredibly waned, and I’m deeply concerned about it. As someone who came out of the business, who still loves the business, there’s no millennial or Gen Z strategy whatsoever. The commercial load problem has never been even seriously thought of.

Larry Miller

You mean there are too many commercials?

Buzz Knight

Yeah.

Larry Miller

You should tell somebody in the radio.

Buzz Knight

Business, oh, I have tried, hello, testing, I have tried. So I’m deeply concerned about it and I appreciate your explanation of it because it is complicated. I know you have served and done work around the Copyright Royalty Board. I did the same sort of on the side of the industry, really didn’t have to go into the court, if you will. They accepted my deposition.

Larry Miller

That saved you a couple of days. It did.

Buzz Knight

And look localism. And radio is an important attribute and still remains an important attribute, especially when difficult things happen in markets and communities. But I’m deeply concerned. So I have gone on the record and will continue to go on the record with that concern.

Larry Miller

For sure, I don’t teach classes in the summer. That’s just my choice. But during the rest of the year, I’m in front of rooms of young people. When I ask them if they listen to the radio, they either give me a blank look, they say, yeah, they listen to Pandora. Or when they’re in mom or Dad’s car, maybe Sirius XM or perhaps the Am FM radio station that they grew up with. But it wouldn’t be their choice. By and large, now there are a handful of students and other young people who aren’t students who do still listen to radio. Look at it. Super convenient. Still. It’s super convenient. And pop radio in particular is still an important factor in validating the biggest hits. Would you agree?

Buzz Knight

I would agree. Validates a good word because it’s generally not the initial form of discovery. It is a form of discovery, but really it is more of a form of validation. I think that’s well put, Larry, as we wind down here for our walk at the colorful Washington Square Park I.

Larry Miller

 It’s awesome over there, isn’t?

Buzz Knight

Oh, my God.

Larry Miller

Yeah, it runs pretty much around the year.

Buzz Knight

It’s amazing. The smells, too.

Larry Miller

Yes.

Buzz Knight

A lot of weed in the park.

Larry Miller

But there are flowers. Other kinds of flowers. Yeah, exactly.

Buzz Knight

So I know there’s some work you’re doing on some boards.

Larry Miller

Can you talk about that?

Buzz Knight

Yes. I think it’s exciting. It’s so cool.

Larry Miller

Thanks for asking. For the last couple of years, I’ve been on the board of the Newport Festivals Foundation, that is, the board of directors of the nonprofit that runs the Newport Jazz Festival and the Newport Folk Festival, which for me is a particular honor for a number of reasons. My parents went on one date that we know about after they met. My mother passed just in the last couple of years. My dad is still very much with us. He’s 90 and I hope listening. And they went on a date in Boston where they were from To Storyville, which was named for the New Orleans Storyville. It was a club in Boston in Old Copley Plaza that was started by a young guy when he was still at Boston University, George Wein. George went on to found the Newport Jazz Festival and later the Newport Folk Festival. And by the way, for more information on the Newport Jazz  Folk Festivals when George passed away just this past September on my podcast, The Musonomics Podcast, we did a really special episode about George and Newport and what it was about him that really had him kind of write the map or dig the well for how the modern, non classical summer music festival ought to run. And it still runs that way anyway.

Buzz Knight

Great. And, by the way, a labor of love on that episode.

Larry Miller

It was. Thank you. So I went on the Newport board a couple of years ago. I had a couple of other friends who were on it. I had known George pretty much my whole adult life and he had become a really close family friend. And so it was a great honor for me to be on that board while George was still alive. Along with, by the way, my friend Michael Dorf who just walked past us 45 minutes ago. Yeah, Michael’s on that board, too. I’m looking forward to the Newport Folk Festival, which is the third weekend of July and the Jazz Festival, which is the fourth weekend of July. So those are now nonprofits and they are run by just an incredible organization. Jay. Sweet, the executive producer and head of the whole organization which, by the way, is a super skinny organization. To produce these two events every year, the way that they do is a miracle. It’s a modern miracle. So we have the Newport Jazz folk festivals. And just this week, I went on the board of the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Wow. This is the house that Louis and his wife lived in up until the time he died. It is in Corona, Queens. It is owned by the City of New York and under the auspices of Queens College but it houses the Louis Armstrong Archive. There is an unbelievably dedicated and also super skinny staff that runs the Louis Armstrong House Museum led by now another just spectacularly talented and dedicated director whose name is Regina Bain. And she is now, I think, in her second year as director. She’s fabulous. And coming up this fall, right across the street from the townhouse that Lewis lived in that houses the archive, is a spectacular new $22 million building that’s going to be an education and performance center right there. Part of the Louis Armstrong House Museum that is for the community and for everyone. It is the result of a 20 year massive development project that is finally going to see the light of day. Now, I have a family reason for wanting to have gotten involved in the Armstrong House. That became much more pointed to me over this past year. And my father in law, Jerry Chazen, who passed away at age 94 in February had been the chairman of that board. Jerry was a brilliant business person and a fantastic philanthropist and force for good in the world and was involved in many organizations. That the thing that he really cared most deeply about. With all due respect to Newport, please forgive me. Newport People was the Louis Armstrong House Museum. To honor him, I wanted to get more involved. And I’m now officially more involved and will be for, I hope, a very long time.

Buzz Knight

That’s awesome. Well, I will say every time I connect with you, I learn and I learn more, and I get excited about the things that you’re excited about. And I can’t thank you enough for taking a walk here today in the colorful Washington Square Park, Larry.

Larry Miller

Thank you for having me, Buzz. And look, the future is bright. We’re lucky to be living through the era that we are now. Notwithstanding the individual complaints and the grievances that many people have, rightly or wrongly, we are lucky to be living through this period of human history. And I do think that the future is bright in particular for people who love and appreciate music as a motivating force in their life.

Buzz Knight

Well put.

Thank you, Larry.

Taking a walk with Buzz Knight, available on.

Spotify, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.