Alan Cross: Music is Back

Matt Cundill  0:00  
Now last time we spoke, we were wondering what would happen to concerts because it was 2020 or 2021. And there was no concert business. And I think we were discussing what was going to happen to the business. So now that we're well past the pandemic, was there a legacy change to concerts in concert structure, or did the industry just pick off from where it left off?

Alan Cross  0:21  
Well, it tried to, but then it found that it was in all kinds of supply chain issues territory, I remember talking to Deryck Whibley, of Sum 41. And the band had gone on a tour of the UK in Europe. And they had to go back to using a van. And the reason they had to go back to using a van is because Metallica also went on tour and they took up all the tour buses. And the rest of the tour buses were parked because they had not been used for a couple of years. So they were like old Soviet tanks, they needed to be resurrected with, you know, tires, and maintenance and all that sort of stuff. And if you could get one, they were extremely expensive because they were in such short supply. So they were once again reduced the traveling across Europe in a van. The other thing that we've seen is a rise in concert ticket prices. And this has happened for a couple of reasons. First of all, nobody's selling records anymore. So you need to get the majority of your revenue from playing live. And everybody following COVID went on the road to try and recoup some some revenue that they lost during those two years. And many of them went on the road to make up for dates that had to be canceled. So they had to honor contracts that were signed in 2020. And before at 2020. And before rates. So the problem was that they were paying more for buses, they were paying more for staging, they were paying more for sound equipment, they were paying more for lights, they were paying more for roadies, they were paying more for all these things, and also having to honor the contract by being paid less. And in some cases, artists would go out on the tour to fulfill these old obligations and come back all weighing money, because everything had become so expensive. Now, that's the artist side of things. If we look at the fan side of things, we were really frustrated being locked down. And when everything began to ease, we had this period of what was known as fun inflation, dammit, we were inside for two years, I'm going to spend money to have a good time regardless of how much it costs. So I'm gonna go on trips, I'm gonna buy stuff. And I'm gonna go to concerts, regardless of what it costs. So for a couple of years, we gorged on going to concerts. And yeah, we complained about the high price of concert tickets, but it didn't matter because we were looking to make up for lost time. At the same time that happened. We have Taylor Swift and Beyonce going on tour. And they charged an awful lot for their tickets. And people began to travel to see these shows and pay airfare and hotel rooms and whatever else. And just going to a Taylor Swift show, you know, would cost you 234 $1,000, depending on what you wanted to do. So that took an awful lot of money out of the ecosystem. And now with ticket prices being what they are inflation being what it is, and transportation costs being what they are, people are thinking, You know what, I'm gonna go to two, three shows a year. That's it, because that's all my budget can support. And as a result, mid tier and lower tier bands are suffering, because there's not $25 left over to go see abandoned the club or abandoned the midsize venue. And that is starting to rip loads way throughout the concert ecosystem.

Matt Cundill  3:38  
And catch me up because I think there's a venue locally where you are, which I saw on social media, which was going to close his stores. And I think that's part of the ripple effect of the whole thing. Is that right? Well,

Alan Cross  3:49  
that was the Phoenix, the Phoenix has been around in one form or another it was called the diamond before that and goes all the way back to sometime in the 90s. Maybe the 80s As a matter of fact, and the Phoenix is by the 1200 person venue. But it's in a weird spot. It's at 410 Sherborn Street in downtown Toronto, right smack in the middle of a dense residential area. And it was a German club of the German Canadian Club for a very long time. So it was just that it was like a you know, a Legion hall. It wasn't so much of a big deal. But over the years, it became this very important concert venue. And you know how it is gentrification, especially in downtown Toronto. It's time for the Phoenix to be redeveloped into something which is more in keeping with the neighborhood. So it's going to close in the early part of 2025. However, the owners have said that they're already looking for a new space, and that the Phoenix will and I'm sorry to do this rise from the ashes at some point next year.

Matt Cundill  4:47  
So the thing that has crossed my mind and worries me just a little bit is that rock experiences on the radio with traditional stations whether it's edge or Q or shome. And if those stations go way people lose their connection to it. So when I see a venue go away, it's the same thing. It's very tough to go and reestablish, you know what was once famous and simple that we all know the spectrum and Montreal and we all know the Phoenix and we all know these wonderful venues, the Commodore in Vancouver, and if they do go away, it's tough to replace them. Well, you

Alan Cross  5:17  
just talk to anybody who wants to play live in Vancouver, playing in Vancouver proper is very, very difficult because there's no place to play. gentrification is has moved in and forced out a lot of the small clubs. So if you want to go see a show in I guess you gotta go to Surrey or you got to go to Richmond. And that's not good talk to anybody who's working in Vancouver. And they'll say that this is this is not good. There's there's no place for us to play. There's tons of talent. In Vancouver, there's tons of interest in going to see a show in Vancouver. It's just that in Vancouver proper, the number of places to play have dwindled. And it's, it's not good.

Matt Cundill  5:53  
Yeah. And by the way, I should have known that, you know, from the opening question about, you know, the trucks disappearing off the road because I had a branded podcast with a concert trucking company that had to stop the podcast after three episodes, because they couldn't get any trucks in the supply chain was all messed up. So there's this great podcast, I started with a great concept and we had miles Goodwin from April wine on, but we couldn't continue because of that trucking supply shortage that you were mentioning. So

Alan Cross  6:19  
yeah, and again, it's not just trucks. It's roadies and sound gear, it's lighting gear, it's the staging gear, it's everything that goes into putting what is essentially a small army on the road for months at a time.

Matt Cundill  6:32  
You touched on Taylor Swift. And there's definitely a Taylor Swift effect that happens in North America. Last year, it actually kept everybody else from going out on the road, because she would come into town and she would vacuum up all the money from miles around. And I think that kept a lot of other artists saying and hosting, I think I'll wait till next year before going out on the road.

Alan Cross  6:54  
It's very possible. And it's not only just the artists, it's also the fans, because right now, Taylor Swift was coming to Toronto for a sick show stand at the Rogers Center. And if you want a hotel room anywhere in downtown Toronto, you're looking at $1,500 and up per night, you know, this is on top of any sort of travel that you may have to do, you know, rent a car, the restaurants going to be packed. Taytay does bring an awful lot of economic activity to wherever she plays, but she leaves with an awful lot of money to you, which is fine, but it makes it very difficult on the city later, because she took all the money from all the disposable income from all these people, which which makes it very difficult, you know, and that's not a knock against her. That's just a simple economic reality.

Matt Cundill  7:40  
When did this start that bands or concert promoters would hold on to our money for a year? So in Taylor Swift is a good example, because the tickets went on sale, but 15 months in advance the show. So that's being held long time and Rage Against the Machine. I know they had to cancel a bunch of dates across Canada, they held on to that money for upwards of 18 months to two years. Yes, there were some COVID involved there. But you know, Is that legal? Well,

Alan Cross  8:06  
it's the Costco model. Costco doesn't pay their suppliers for until 180 days go by. Because what they do to help keep their prices down is they put the money that they earn in escrow, and it sits there and earns interest. Now, what happens to that interest? In the case of Costco? Is they just reinvested into the business, and they help keep prices down. In the concert business, there's all kinds of negotiations that go on. Who gets that interest? Is it you know, the artist is the promoter? Is it the venue? I honestly don't know. But you know that when tickets go on sale, 1214 1518 months in advance, that there's this giant pool of money sitting in an account somewhere. And that money has to be put to work, and it's put to work in a variety of ways. And the spoils are distributed or divided in some interesting way. It's just another way of milking as much revenue as you can and have a particular tour.

Matt Cundill  8:59  
Bruce Springsteen and Winnipeg is another one that comes to mind. I know Kevin Donnelly has been just itching to get Bruce to come to Winnipeg, and he's finally made it happen. So it went on sale, nine months in advance, but then Bruce got sick, postponed for a year. And now we're looking at close to two years that the money is I mean, I could see myself forgetting that I bought tickets.

Alan Cross  9:19  
It did happen. Remember when when Bonner hurt his back during the 360 tour, and that put everything off for about a year. And by law, the promoter has to refund anybody who asks for their money back because of this, but most people will just okay, well, whatever, sit on an end. Yeah, you're right. A lot of people forget that. Oh, yeah. 19 months ago, I bought tickets for this show. I wonder where they are. You know, it was bad enough when we had paper tickets, and we would put them up in the cupboard someplace and just go and get them or we would have to go and exchange them or whatever. We would have like a physical reminder that we had these tickets, but now in the era of the electronic ticket It's on one of my phones, maybe two phones ago? Where are these tickets? And if you lose them, you know, good luck trying to find them.

Matt Cundill  10:08  
I become very cynical, too. Bit of a sucker. I don't even know how to buy concert tickets. I think I just go to StubHub, I immediately go to the resale market now to go and purchase tickets, because the shows I want to go to are always sold out. And I think I just go to a resale marketplace to get them. Is that crazy? My doing it wrong? Well,

Alan Cross  10:30  
no, buying tickets is one of the most opaque and frustrating consumer activities that we can do, simply because an artist will come to town and leave and you had no idea that they had come to town until it was too late. The other problem is one of availability. If you have an arena, let's say that holds 15,000 people, you would expect that at 10 o'clock on Friday morning, that 15,000 Tickets will be available to the general public through Ticketmaster. Well, that's not the case. Because before everything gets open to the general public, there's a series of tickets blocks of tickets known as hold backs that are taken from that 15,000 ticket pool. So for example, you need the fan club to be looked after American Express as their front of the line offer, you have to take tickets out for that tickets have to be taken out for the venue, the band, the artist will demand a certain number of friends and family tickets, the label will demand some friends and family tickets. There'll be other credit cards, there'll be other deals where you can get into when you don't have to line up with the unwashed masses. So by the time tickets go on sale on Friday, that 15,000 may have dwindled down to 9000 or less, because of all these hold backs. And don't forget to that, in the old days, you bought tickets for the show in your immediate geographic area. Today, thanks to electronic ticketing, you're competing for those remaining, let's say 9000 tickets with people all over the world. And with the way ticket master works and their high speed processing, I can't remember the number is but it's in the it's in the hundreds of transactions per minute that they can handle or maybe even hundreds of transactions per second that they can handle. So when you're dealing with, let's say 9000 tickets, and you got 40 or 50, or 60 or 70,000 people wanting those 9000 tickets, it's no surprise that at 1001 and 30 seconds, all the tickets are gone.

Matt Cundill  12:31  
And then the other thing that I think is a little bit? Well, I don't want to say that I think it's wrong. Because in the airline industry, we put up with it. But I think a lot of concert goers get frustrated with dynamic pricing. And I think it's something that the Eagles started, when they would put their tickets on sale, the more people who requested the premium seats at the front, the bigger that premium section got to the point where you were buying premium tickets, and there were three quarters of the way to the back of the orchestra. So is dynamic pricing. Is that something that is being looked at that could change that could go away? Or is that here to stay?

Alan Cross  13:06  
Well, dynamic pricing is again another way for an artist to make a little bit more money based on the supply and demand. And I have a hard time arguing against it. Because you're right, we deal with it with airline tickets, we deal with it with hotel rooms and any number of things that are subjected to high demand when the number of tickets available is very low. And there's no way to solve that. If you have you know, for example, when Taylor Swift put the era's tickets on first year, she wanted to sell 52 stadiums worth of tickets in one day. And Ticketmaster was so besieged by requests, many of them billions of them, in fact, coming from bots, the whole thing just collapsed, and there was no way to satisfy everybody. Also, if everybody had been satisfied, and everybody who asked for a ticket got one, it would have meant that Taylor Swift would have had to play a stadium show for 912 days in a row, which is just obviously not possible. That's every day for more than three like three years. So supply and demand is something that is not going away and cannot be solved. So the idea that, you know, this is ticketmasters fault, this is live nation's fault. This is a G's fault. This is event brights fault. It's not you do not have a right to go to a show. I don't care how big a fan you are. There is nothing that gets you to the front of the line just because you are a fan. You got to play the game, you know, be part of the fan club, get yourself an American Express card. There's another thing I forgot to mention is when you're dealing with large venues like the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, if you buy a season ticket, you have to pay something called a seat license in addition to the cost of the tickets and in exchange for that seat license. Well that seats yours for everything that happens to go through that particular venue. So if you're a Toronto Raptors season ticket holder, you are all furred ahead of time, tickets for anything that might happen at the Scotiabank arena. Now, you're not going to want to go to all of these these events. So as a result, you're gonna make a relationship with the secondary ticket sellers. And you will guarantee them, your ticket your seat for any shows coming up for which what they will pay you, and then they'll just sell it on the secondary market.

Matt Cundill  15:23  
With some of these acts that we're hearing in the news, like the black keys, who had to downsize from the venues that they thought they would be playing, and Justin Timberlake allegedly not selling tickets to concerts. Again,

Alan Cross  15:35  
this, this goes back to the idea of too many people being on tour, and not enough money to fill arenas. In the case of the black keys. That's a weird one because they were managed by Irving A's off, moving his off, most famously being in the head of MCA Records, being the manager of the Eagles, running something called iconic artists these days. And he had planned everything out. So the black keys would play larger venues, mostly arenas. And when tickets didn't sell, they had no choice but to scale things down into what they call a much more intimate setting. So, you know, from playing 12,000 13,000 seats, they're playing Five. And when they did that, they fired Irving A's off and his management team. So that's interesting, I there's a lot more to that particular story than we're being told now with Jennifer Lopez, for example, her tour was canceled because nobody cared. Nobody was buying tickets. And I'm not sure about Justin Timberlake, that sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theory to me. But I wouldn't be surprised, again, so much money has been sucked out of the concert economy because of shows that got there first. And because of inflation and all these other things, that it's plausible, it honestly is plausible. Now I'm gonna give you somebody to follow. And there is an x account called at under face value. And this is kind of a underground sort of thing. So don't tell too many people. This account digs up bargain bin ticket prices, as tickets struggle to sell out shows. So the ticket price might be the face value of the ticket price might be originally, let's call it 660 $9. But Tony, who is the guy that is behind this account, looks around for tickets that have been dropped in price just to fill the venue. No artist wants to stand on stage and see a bunch of empty space or a bunch of empty seats. So Tony recently found that Oh, Vampire Weekend is playing in Phoenix. They've dropped tickets from whatever they were vampire weakens, probably worth, you know, $50 ticket. Tickets are now selling for $6. So look for under face value at under face value on x. What

Matt Cundill  17:54  
about the forthcoming lawsuit involving Live Nation and Ticketmaster? Not gonna

Alan Cross  18:00  
make a difference? Not at all. Because, again, here's what you have to understand about Ticketmaster. They do what they do very well. They do it better than anybody else. And the reason we know that is because all the other competition has completely folded in ticketmasters wake. I have a feeling that the whole scene go back in 2010, the DOJ in the United States approved the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation with certain conditions. Since then, there has been a lot of public outcry about Ticketmaster. People love to hate Ticketmaster, which by the way, is by design, it's much better for the artist to find an external other like Ticketmaster to hate and blame, rather than the artist itself. So Ticketmaster, is set up to absorb all this particular criticism. So when Taylor Swift, for example, tried to put all those tickets on sale, and Ticketmaster couldn't do it. Well, you know, she she won both ways. If it had worked, she would have been able to say that she went clean on 52 Stadium shows. If it didn't work, well, she could blame Ticketmaster. So either way, you know, she wins. And that's, that's something that nobody talks about. So with this particular case, I find it to be very populist in nature. Politicians just want to go after this organization. And I'm not defending or apologizing for Ticketmaster. I'm just saying that this is a weird sort of way of looking at things. If they have in fact, violated the terms set up by the DOJ when their merger was approved in 2010. By all means, take action. They didn't live up to their bargain nailed to the wall. But what's your option? Fine. You see your breakup Live Nation, and Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster has to be purchased by someone I don't know who has the deep pockets to purchase something like Ticketmaster and then hopefully, some kind of competition for selling tickets will emerge. Okay. But so what Ticketmaster makes its money by Adding a fee to the price of the concert ticket. Now we got to make sure that everybody understands ticket Master does not set the price of a concert ticket. The price of a concert ticket is set by the artist manager, the promoter and the venue to a certain extent, the only job ticket Master has is to put bums in seats. And for that they put a fee on to the face value of the ticket. That's the only way they make money. Now we can quibble about how big that fee is. It's usually around 5% of the face value of ticket. But you know, if you've got $1,000 ticket, that's that starts to be a lot of money. So okay, fine. Let's say you have a tour and tickets go on sale and multiple computerized ticket companies are selling tickets for that particular tour. Here's the problem. Who gets what tickets? Now I'm gonna go back to the 70s when we used to line up for tickets at a physical box office. Tickets were hard items they were printed out in advance. And the guests was which box office has the best seats was be, you know, the bay downtown would it be eton's at St. Battelle center? Would it be this record store on Portage Avenue? Would it be the box office at the Winnipeg arena or wherever it was? We didn't know. So it becomes a matter of allocation. So if you have multiple computerized ticket companies selling tickets for the same show, who gets the best tickets, so this would be taking us back to the bad old days. Another thing that might happen, Kate break up Ticketmaster, Live Nation is now having to compete with we're going back to the old days, again, with regional promoters. So let's say a couple of shows are happening in the US northeast, you have Ticketmaster and any number of other promoters bidding for that show. One of the ways you bid for the show is you give the artist the biggest guarantee per gig, the best financial arrangement for going with that particular promoter. Eventually, somebody will win. And it's going to be almost always the promoter that's offering the biggest guarantee and the most money for the artist just makes sense. So now the promoter is on the hook for that extra money for that money that he or she promised the artist and has to make it back somehow. So you know how you do you do that? You raise prices. So it's not going to help anybody. Again, not an apologist, not a ticket Master, you know, cheerleader, I'm just saying that. Okay, so do this, break them up. What's next? Tell me how this is going to work in the future.

Matt Cundill  22:40  
You have a degree in history from the University of Winnipeg. And so I think it's only fitting that you are interested in putting together a documentary involving CF and why. And I love this. Yes,

Alan Cross  22:54  
it is done. Oh, for a number of years, there was a bunch of us alumni. Well, I'm not an alumni. I'm still at the radio station. But me and some other people who used to work there over the years, especially those who were there in the late 70s through to the early 1990s. Were kind of upset that we were seeing all these documentaries show up on Netflix and everywhere else about radio stations in the United States, that crowed about how important they were, how influential they were, and how weird they were all that sort of stuff. And it's like, yeah, just again, more America trying to steal the spotlight for everything cultural. But we should do a documentary. Yeah, we should. Well, how? I don't know, but you know about making movies, nothing. Okay. So it laid that way for quite some time until I ran across a director named Matt Schecter. And he was working for a company called high ball entertainment. And I happened to mention this this documentary, he grew up with the radio station, this is a great idea. Let's do it. So he went pitched his people. And they loved it. Because they had to do that a production schedule of three feature films and one documentary per year, something like that. And they said, Yeah, go ahead and do it. So starting in November 2022, we started with all kinds of interviews. And that extended through to all through 2023, as a matter of fact, and everything was was locked and loaded by the end of 2023. Then there was in post production and music licensing and a few other things. And right now it's done. I can tell you right now that the movie is done, it talks about CF and why and its spirit of radio years from 1977 ish through to 1992. It's a love letter to radio. It's a love letter to alternative music. And right now we're chopping it to various distributors and hoping to get it into any number of film festivals it is coming in should be somewhere by the end of the year, if we're lucky.

Matt Cundill  24:44  
And the last time you were on this show might have been time before, but we talked about music and podcasting and the difficulty in getting clearance to getting that stuff done. I don't need to re ask the question because nothing has changed and it's still tough to get music into podcasts. But what hoops did you have to go through to get any musical clearance for the film?

Alan Cross  25:04  
Well, we have two people on the staff who specialize in music clearance. One of them one of the executive producers. Her name is Barb Hill. She's a Canadian working in Nashville. She is an Emmy award winning documentary producer, she's got a couple of awards for things that she did for PBS. And her other gig is music clearance. So she's very good at it. And then Ivor Hamilton, another executive producer was for 30 plus years working at Universal Music, and dealt with music licensing all the time. And from the record company side from the music publisher side, so he knew exactly what needed to be done. Part of the problem with the current much music documentary that is not out there right now is because the music wasn't cleared properly. So all distribution has been halted until that can get sorted, we will not have that problem. You're

Matt Cundill  25:51  
also a part of another documentary, one that I haven't seen yet. I was supposed to watch it last night didn't get around to it. The Nickelback one. Yeah, love to hate from Nickelback, which is just popped onto Netflix. It's been around, you could rent it or you know, buy it over the past few weeks. But tell me about Nickelback. How to, like, why do we need to do this? How did Nickelback get here? And why does it test so well at radio stations?

Alan Cross  26:16  
Exactly. I have never really understood why Nickelback is getting this disproportionate amount of hate from from everybody. It doesn't make any sense. They're very popular. Excellent meat and potatoes, rock band that has millions of fans around the world are on the radio all the time. For the 10 years that began this century, they were the most played artists on American radio, and continue to, you know, play giant shows. It didn't make any sense. Why them why you know, there's them. And then there's Smash Mouth, the punch lines, it drove me crazy. And I am, I wrote a column for global news one time, basically just summarizing what I said. And somebody from nickel backs, organization, Reddit called me and says, Would you do this on camera and go absolutely not a problem. So they came to my house, and we filmed everything. And yeah, this will be my debut on Netflix. I

Matt Cundill  27:09  
was there at the very beginning for Nickelback, when they would come and drop off CDs that they had pressed at my door, will you play this? No, I will not play this. We will not play this. And eventually, their mother called the bear in Edmonton enough time said, Okay, fine, we'll play it. And then they had a little momentum. And we actually invited them to the music meeting to watch the process because they thought we had it in for them. And I said, No, this is how we choose records. And I invited them into the music meeting to show them how it's all done said, This is what you do. Yeah. And I sometimes think that they would actually work and work records and write songs. Oh, we want it. So it does get on the radio. Absolutely.

Alan Cross  27:46  
You know, Chad, Chad converts is a really smart dude. And he for a very long time, he was his own promo rep. He would call radio stations, he would visit radio stations. And he did not give up. And he believed in the band, he believed that they could be successful. And he was right. You know, he can't fault that. That is actually covered in the documentary. He

Matt Cundill  28:10  
got one he got us. And then he went and got see Fox in Vancouver. And then he had momentum. And he saw that he knew that radio, music directors, program directors and charts, it all was part of a big penguin effect. That would just make it happen as it were.

Alan Cross  28:26  
That's true. He was a student of the industry, learned how it worked. You know, he wasn't playing both hands against the other. He wasn't trying to find any shortcuts. He'd learned how the music industry worked. And that helped him for the interests of the band. Nothing wrong with that.

Matt Cundill  28:43  
And all the people that would say I don't like Nickelback, I would ask them, Well, what do you prefer instead, and they would always name bands I'd either never heard of, or we're not going to play big arenas ever. Listen,

Alan Cross  28:54  
the world needs big mainstream x because they supply a lot of the revenue back to labels that helps them discover new X. And remember, if a label signs 10x, seven of them are gonna lose money, two of them are going to break even and one's going to pay for all the rest of them.

Matt Cundill  29:11  
The Ongoing History of New Music is something I mean, I've known about it forever, we would run it on radio stations. It was a show it was on edge. And then it was all over course. And I remember the struggles and the pain in everyone's eyes when we said we got to make this a podcast, and how we had to edit out all the music but keep all the words and it was worth it though, right 22

Alan Cross  29:31  
million downloads, the music is really important. And we can come back to this idea of how the music industry is leaving so much money on the table by not coming up with a mechanism to legally licensed music for podcasts. There are discussions that are happening right now but it's so unbelievably complicated and so many things have to be addressed before we can actually go ahead with something like that. But having clips of songs which is still shouldn't be doing that, but nobody really makes a big deal. Have it because it's not like you're distributing full songs in contravention to a contract an artist may have with a record label. It's promotion more than anything else. So there doesn't seem to be an appetite for going after anybody who uses short clips. And there are literally 1000s and 1000s of podcasts professionally done podcast by big networks that do exactly the same thing. There has never been a problem.

Matt Cundill  30:24  
And you've got another podcast called Uncharted crime and mayhem in the music industry. And so for those who haven't hooked onto that yet and need some summer listening, tell us about it. It

Alan Cross  30:35  
is the intersection of true crime, the biggest podcast genre there is, and music. We couldn't find any true crime in music, podcasts. I'm sure there's a few out there. But with Okay, well, let's, let's try it. And I'm up to what did I do the other day, episode number 22. So we do they come out every two weeks. And we're gonna do this as long as we possibly can. Turns out there's an awful lot of true crime and music stories out there that haven't been told at least there hasn't been a anthology of such things. So, so far, so good.

Matt Cundill  31:08  
I asked my friends, I said, What should I ask Alan to talk about? And one of the things that did come up with those who get canceled, you know, whether it's our Kelly, or whether it's people who do bad things, trying to remember the Canadian band, oh. Headley? Yeah, that one, a band can be canceled. Oh,

Alan Cross  31:27  
yes. This is a side effect of social media. You know, if people do bad things, they should be called out for it. And if it's prosecutable, well, then they should be prosecutable and get their day in court. It becomes very difficult, though. Because, you know, how do you separate the art from the artist? You know, Michael Jackson, for example, will continue to be the biggest artists that we have seen in our lifetime. And there were some awful allegations about him yet. I can't think of anybody that's canceled Michael Jackson. But if you look at you know, wind Butler and Arcade Fire, God, I mean, you know, wind came forward and admitted his bad behavior, but that didn't really matter, apparently. And in Arcade Fire, you know, one of the most promising bands of the century is in trouble right now. Matt Good, had problems based on some allegations made on Facebook posts, and that hurt his career. He's kind of bounced back. But I mean, there's always this this quick reaction, like, Oh, somebody's complained about this particular artist for doing something before we have a chance to have this person in court and talk about everything that they've done, or not done. We're going to err on the side of caution and bring them off the air. You know, and I understand why people have that reaction, but it's not always fair. I mean, if it's Marilyn Manson, I'm okay. If it's somebody who is being tarred and feathered anonymously on Facebook or social media, well, show me the proof. Alan,

Matt Cundill  32:49  
thanks so much for doing this and getting back together with me to talk music I knew we'd be doing it didn't think it would take this long after COVID but here we aren't thanks.

Alan Cross  32:56  
Anytime you want.