Brad Mindich: the art and craft of archiving stardom

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: Hi, how are you?

Brad Mindich: I'm good. It's been a minute.

LP: Twenty-five years or so! (laughter)

A lot of the intervening years in different work I've done is relevant to what you do now, so I think it'll inform the conversation in a nice way. We'd love to discuss your origins, specifically your legacy and on-ramp into music and entertainment.

Brad Mindich: I think the most relevant part—and there are probably a couple of relevant parts that intersect and perhaps kind of led me to where I am today—is that I did want to be a musician. That was my goal, as well as millions of other people. So there was a period in my life when I was practicing the guitar for eight hours a day, and I had super long hair and chain-smoked and all of that and lived for that possibility, which translated into me booking bands for a nightclub.

Then my rock star dreams didn't quite turn out the way that I expected, but a critical part of my appreciation for music and the craft and the experience and the creators who do this on a level that is so extraordinary and far superior to anything that I would have been able to do. And I don't say that in any kind of critical way about myself or what have you. There is such a level of talent that is so superior.

I remember doing a whole guitar session studying thing at the Berklee College of Music for a while. And I had teachers a year older than me who were so amazing. There's a natural talent there. And I was somebody that just had to work hard at it. It did help shape me. But I think that in combination with growing up in the family business that I grew up in, which was in the media world, and specifically the Boston Phoenix and WFNX, which some of your listeners would be familiar with, and perhaps some of them would not, but truly revolutionary in their impact as an alternative weekly newspaper and alternative radio station playing those artists that nobody had heard of before, whether it's Nirvana or Pearl Jam or The Smiths or Cure or Smashing Pumpkins, or the list goes on and on. Still, FNX being the ones that played it first, the Boston Phoenix and the Village Voice being the first two alternative weekly newspapers in the country that shaped a different way of thinking and reporting and connecting and what was meaningful to communities, different communities, whatever they might be, or political, social, activism, arts.

And there are some very powerful things that sort of shaped how I saw the relationship between content and audience. And I think that's the biography. Everything we do now at Invenium and Definitive is content and audience.

LP: One bridge I was hoping you could help me cross is the connection between that sort of summary that you just gave of your biography and the family business and not only the entertainment part of media, but the investigative journalism—you know, I sort of broadly would put it in the bucket of like advocacy, not for any specific cause, but just for voices, whether it is in the arts or whether it's people in the community that needed to have someone on their behalf doing that kind of work.

And I'm curious about the role your education played, your formal secondary education between that work and your work in the more commercial side of your life. Are there strands there? And if so, what are they?

Brad Mindich: I think it's an insightful question, and there's certainly a thread or various threads that interconnect in some way, shape, or form.

So I guess going back to kind of address some of the voices nature of what you mentioned when we talk about on the music side with FNX and some of those bands or artists or whoever that we brought to the world that wouldn't have had a chance to hear Nirvana for the first time or whoever it might be from that particular genre, the alternative music genre that shaped and influenced culture.

So you're talking about voices, cultural connectivity, impact, appropriation, and all sorts of interesting things. And then on the newspaper side, this is even more expansive in a lot of ways, just given the nature of the particular medium, in the sense that some of the things that popped into my head immediately is the Phoenix, when AIDS was, people were not paying attention to it the way they should have, so maybe this was, I don't know, '83? '82? '83? The Phoenix put a safe sex kit into every newspaper, which included instructions on safe sex and a condom. Nobody had ever done that. I can tell you that the church in Boston was not particularly pleased with that, but it was that commitment to social awareness and seriousness of—you know, we all know what AIDS wound up becoming in just a few short years.

But I think it was that or whether the Phoenix sponsored the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit, which, again, people lost their minds from the conservative side, but these were missions we had to do, right? It was just the nature of our DNA from the investigative journalism side. And the last point is that sometimes I'll talk to people about the Phoenix. I'll mention funny things like the Phoenix is mentioned on an episode of The Simpsons or it's the newspaper that City on a Hill created by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck—it's the Phoenix that they picked as you want to stay away from that reporter. She's aggressive and will dig into the bottom like things like that or in the movie Spotlight in that sort of early on in the scene when Stanley Tucci's character is saying to Michael Rezendes, the Globe reporter, well, I don't know why you're covering the Catholic church thing. The Phoenix already did that. And that was true. We broke the Catholic Church scandal, and the line that immediately followed was correct, which said the Phoenix didn't have the money to keep digging in further, which was, in fact, true, but we did break that story. So, things like that impact culture and community and are connected with the formal education side.

That's particularly important to me. That is a foundation of how I look at things through this impact on culture, society, and voices and how that intersects with content and education in the broadest and most specific sense.

LP: I have some other questions around that, but just to be explicit, what are the degrees you hold?

Brad Mindich: I have a bachelor's in English. I have an MBA. I have a master's in memory theory, and then I have a doctorate in organizational behavior.

LP: It's interesting to hear you articulate those because your work is like a manifestation; your commercial work is a manifestation of all those things. It's fascinating. You don't often meet people outside of things, like a doctor going to medical school or a lawyer going to law school, but you have the academic training for what you do.

Brad Mindich: I'd love to say that was all planned, but I think it was just an alignment of the planets in the universe. And I don't belong anywhere near an operating room or NASA or any—

LP: I think of it as interest and aptitude, right? Yeah, interest and aptitude are coming together.

Brad Mindich: Yes. Don't stray too far off the path, I suppose.

LP: Yeah. I'd like to stay there for one moment because there was something I came across sort of late in my prep for this, so I didn't get to read the articles, and I'm very much looking forward to it. A few articles were posted: one that you had written about Rastafarianism, one about the biker subculture, and one about the concept or notion of pre-nostalgia. Pre-nostalgia is interesting. It comes up a lot in my conversations with music artists on this podcast because of how technologies now are behaving and how people and artists, in particular, are using them, the sort of blending of analog and electronic.

And the technology, specifically of the late '70s and early '80s, you had this really interesting blend of analog and digital. The aesthetic of that era, video audio, really resonates. It seems to be that there's still humanity in the machine at that point. Even if we look back at how we like some of that video, it resonates with people, especially how the color looks.

Many bands of that era held up remarkably well, and it's that mixture of the first digital technology that people are still playing. So you have the flaws and the mistakes. It's not as perfect as what came later in pure digital. And just that notion of, like, this is what the future looked like back then (laughter) and how it stirs something sort of, again, like nostalgic, but almost maybe for a time that didn't fully exist.

Brad Mindich: I like how you just said that nostalgia for a time that didn't exist, and I think it's the impact, and I'm certainly fascinated with nostalgia and memory theory and emotions and how that impacts behavior and all those other types of things, is so powerful and impactful on who we are as people and members of communities and stuff like that.

And the shaping, the early emotions, the longing, right? The nature of nostalgia is this nature of longing. And by the way, longing can be positive or negative. It's not that longing has to be negative. I missed out on some of this concept of pre-nostalgia around the nature of missing things and making certain decisions before they become nostalgic and the nature of regret.

I love how you sort of tie this in with the music side of it because even very, I want to say somewhat superficial level, the resurgence of vinyl and this what was is again, you know after it wasn't. And why is that? Why this connectivity? What is going on here? And yes, it sounds better, and there are a gazillion reasons like that, and lots of artists, of course, are hyper advocates about it, whether it's the Jack Whites or Eric Churches or people like that.

But I think there is this nature of connectivity with the medium, with the longing, with the stories, with the culture, with the community, right? There's a thing with this, right? And I think you've honed in on a piece of it. I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Then you tie in with some of the other stuff that I've written, whether it's about the Rastafarian diaspora, which I'm particularly fascinated with, and cultural appropriation and cross-cutting against various sorts of cultures and things like that, or subcultures like biker subculture and style and substance and language and those things. They all fit in the same orbit of what we're talking about.

LP: Like transparency that all lays over music and music fandom in a very interesting way, which I promise we'll get to in just one more beat. But as a bit of a side road on Rasta, I've only really been interested as a music fan, right? And then a little bit culturally, I've read a little bit about the history of the movement and sort of, let's just say not deep, but something that I just recently came across, which I guess has been known for a while, but I hadn't heard of was the influence of Hinduism and the Indian immigrants on the sort of development of Rasta ideology and early Rasta beliefs.

It was amazing to see some of the parallels, whether it's vegetarianism or the use of ganja. It is fascinating because the Rastas always—you always think of them as the lost tribe or more being more rooted in Old Testament Judaism. But I just, I don't know. Anyway, I bring that up just because it's fresh in my mind and is fascinating.

Brad Mindich: It is fascinating. As an anecdote to add to it, when I was 13 years old, I had posters of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh in my room and begged my parents to let me grow dreadlocks. Just the answer was no. I'm sure that's shocking to anybody, but why was that? I'm not unique. I might have been unique in wanting to grow dreadlocks but not unique in terms of a young age, embracing the music, the culture, the language, forgetting about the use of marijuana, and all of that. But it's just that there's something so extraordinarily unique about reggae and Rastafarianism and how it truly appropriated the colors across multiple communities and cultures, individuals, regardless of race and religion.

I'm not sure there's another parallel that hits all those things, right?

LP: And the strange internationalism of it, too, to have these sort of very rural people looking to like Ethiopia for their savior, like just fascinating. But I think to go back, even if you mention vinyl and pre-nostalgia, these conversations get approached from people's expertise or very narrow vantage points. When you read about the vinyl resurgence, it's often about the commercial implication or the collectability or this, that, and the other thing. And it is, whether it's Rasta or vinyl or all these different subcultures, that there's a deeper resonance that I often can't articulate.

I don't have the vocabulary or the training to get at it, but there's a deeper truth, I think, that is hidden in all of these things that people are gravitating towards. Just like the 13-year-old Boston area-raised white kid drawn to the music and the culture that's happening everywhere all the time. And what are people responding to? What are they rejecting in their upbringing? What are they attracted to in that other thing? The sociology of all of it is so powerful and interesting.

Brad Mindich: Yes. And I think the nature of why, right? And these sorts of relationships, these influential relationships, my introduction, I can tell him again, just to emphasize the point or highlight this a little bit more. My introduction to reggae came from somebody that I met at camp. He was a white Jewish kid like me but played the congas. He also had a deep understanding of not just reggae music but also Afro-Cuban music. He was my age, but he was also like a performer. And I had never touched any. I mean, I just didn't know the first thing about it.

He and I became friends and spent a lot of time together. I learned how to play congas, and I got connected to Afro-Cuban music. So I learned about bands that, as a 13-year-old, I don't know how many 13-year-olds were exposed to, Patato and Totico or Fania All-Stars, but I was because of my friend Brad and the impact that moment in time and connecting with him and him teaching me about this, like that shaped it.

Had that not happened, I'm not sure I would have written about the Rastafarian diaspora. That connective tissue started 40 years ago at just a moment, a relationship. And I think, going back to some of the media stuff, what is that story or what is that song or what is that medium that influences somebody at that moment in time and shapes who they are? For better or for worse, by the way, right? And that's another interesting dynamic.

LP: All that sort of context, formal and informal training, interest and aptitude, as we discussed before, all that informs where you bring to the table for your current work. What's the spectrum on which Invenium and Definitive Authentic sit, and how are they complementary and different?

Brad Mindich: So Invenium is the overarching company, and that is the, for anybody who would poke around, there's very little about us on there, and that's intentional. Our whole business is based on trust, right? Very famous creators across music, sports, or entertainment trust us to take many cases literal possession of their physical and digital artifacts and go through the archival and preservation and protection process and bring them into some sort of order, I guess, for lack of a better way of saying it, so that our clients know what they have and where things are. They can make the creative decisions that they want, right?

So one of the founding tenets of what we do is like you—this is a command of the obvious statement. Still, it's like you got to know what you have to figure out what to do with it, so that's the first step is let's pull this in whether it's a living artist or an estate or a younger artist or more established legacy artist it all goes through the same process so that is very much the intake part of this and sort of pulling these things in and bringing some order to all of this.

And it's across all of these things. So it's audio, video, documents, photos, instruments, clothing, et cetera, anything you would expect. There's nothing we haven't touched. Then, we created Definitive for anything that would be public-facing. And we wanted to keep that separate so that if you look at some of the things we put into the market publicly, whether it's Metallica Black Box, or it's Leppard Vault, or it's the Crüeseum, or it's Backstage with Bon Jovi.

It's all powered by Definitive. We didn't want Invenium's name on there because Invenium is behind this wall, right? It is just that we don't let anybody back there. But we needed something that would be public-facing. That's sort of the separator. If something is public, that will get the Definitive branding, and our certificates of authenticity are under the Definitive brand.

And stuff where if we're working with a client and they say, look, I just want everything safe and preserved and protected and documented. I don't know what I want to do with it. So that never gets a Definitive name on it because it just stays in its secure space. So that's the separation of the two. They are connected, but only when things move from private to public.

LP: The crude analogy that comes to mind would be if Invenium is sort of the database, there's a layer of permissions that get toggled on and off to determine what then Definitive Authentic can show to the world.

Brad Mindich: That's great, simple, and accurate. That's exactly it.

LP: Even hearing you say it, I don't fully grok the intensity around the confidentiality; why would a client care who knows that they are engaging somebody to quantify and manage their archives?

Brad Mindich: It's a really interesting question because I don't know whether they, for the second year I was thinking about it, maybe they don't care, but it's not our information to share.

LP: Gotcha. Okay. So you're not trading on their brand.

Brad Mindich: We're not trading on that. And at least in our experience, that is meaningful for these clients because they know that we start to work with XYZ clients, and we're not sending out a press release saying, "Invenium just signed …" We just don't do that. That doesn't create trust. Whereas if we say, we don't tell anybody about it. We're dealing with, in many cases, our client's most extraordinary piece of cultural history.

LP: To paint a little bit of a picture for listeners, in some of the artists I've worked with, I know that often, let's say they're, we'll put in air quotes, a legacy artist, somebody that's been around 30, 40, 50, 60 years. They've got their public-facing body of work. And now we're in an era of box sets, reissues, and deluxe editions. And some things come out that fans perceive as having been in the vault, which is great. From your perspective, there's not necessarily a vault when you go into a new client. There are tapes in Iron Mountain. There's stuff under a desk in a manager's office. There might be two or three warehouses and maybe even on different continents.

There's stuff in each place that is not necessarily a great chain of custody regarding provenance, ownership, and what falls under a rights deal. There might be another place where there are costumes. Somebody was an amateur photographer, so there are boxes of negatives, like, in other words, you come in, and it's not like, oh, we're just going to go to this address, and everything's there, and we're going to catalog it. What's the range of, not necessarily, environments you walk into, but what roles and services must you provide when wearing just your Invenium hat? Are there 50 people who will go in and attack a project? Is it three? Like, what does it look like?

Brad Mindich: So, the short and unhelpful answer, but I won't stop there, is it depends.

LP: I knew it. (laughter)

Brad Mindich: I mean, I think in a very sort of nonmarketing way to scaffold this, we're IP managers. When you look at it, you described that this is scattered around in different places and involves rights or deterioration. I mean, all these variables factor into it.

So I think the first thing is that we will do as much or as little as the client wants. So we're not imposing our insistence on you to do it like this. You must do all these things or whatever. That's not it. It's very collaborative and comes down to starting with our—to use an overused term—best practices.

We have the highest level of professionalism and amazingly trained, brilliant archivists and curators who've seen and done everything with this. And it's this kind of first thing of let's understand what we're walking into. What is the need? How do we know that from a client's perspective? What's most important to them? What are urgent things? Because there very well could be, and we've seen this countless times where you have a box of hard drives or a box of DAT tapes, you have whatever. And how long have you had these here? I don't know, 15 years, 18 years.

It's like, okay. Do you know what's on them? No. Okay. Right. So there's a thing where there's some immediacy, right? There is an urgency around simply preserving and pulling those things together. From there, everything from the fundamentals of professional archival work, inventorying, and cataloging to preservation, databasing, and metadata.

Then, we go into the story, gathering pieces of it, and then there's its curation and valuing. And then that all leads to the content that drives the creative, right? That leads to, okay, here are some things you can consider now that you know what you have. So it's ordered, and the processes are replicated over and over again, but it's also fluid because every client is different in terms of what they had and what they were.

LP: It's funny to hear you talk about it. I wanted to ask you, well, I'll tell you my little anecdote, and then I'll ask you the question, but there's an artist I work with, and there were a lot of poorly cataloged boxes of tapes at Iron Mountain. But I found a tape I wanted to investigate, so I had to order the whole box.

They sent a box full of tapes, and there was some interesting stuff and then some mundane stuff. But random things were also thrown in, like a crumpled-up dirty t-shirt and an empty beer can. There was just detritus from like somebody was, it was at the end of a tour or at the end of a recording session, whatever it was, somebody just came through and was like, in the box, tape the box and off it went to storage and is part of the confidentiality that you're touching things that maybe nobody knows what you're going to touch, you're going to open a box. There might be something very personal or poignant, and as a sort of corollary to that, can you, without naming names, like are there funny, strange, kooky things you've stumbled across that you're like, "What the hell is this? Or how did this get in there? Oh my God, we found some important thing." Do you have any fun, interesting discoveries you could talk about?

Brad Mindich: Well, certainly on the discovery of the gold types of things, like that stuff where it's, "Oh, here are the handwritten lyrics. Here's the demo tape." I could say, "Oh, this doesn't happen all that often," but it happens all the time. You have enough boxes, and there's always something where it's, where even the client will say, "Where did you find this?" We found it buried in a mismarked box on the bottom of a whatever like that sort of stuff happens all the time. This has only happened once, and it's never happened since: we found a box that had $26,000 in cash. (laughter)

LP: Sure. I mean, especially when you think back in the day, it's only been very recently that even merch sales on the road went through a credit card swipe. It wasn't that long ago when everything at the t-shirt counter was tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash a night.

Brad Mindich: Right. And I don't know where the money came from, but it was just in a box, and there were broken picture frames. I mean, we, you know, there's plenty of times when you open it up, and it's like, there's, you know, garbage, but I think also very personal things, very personal. And I think that's also why we just don't talk about this stuff because if you start with the kind of premise that clients don't know what they have, which is really almost always the case, and sometimes I'll talk to people and they'll say, well, how is that possible?

I'll say, do you know everything you have in your basement or your attic? Because I bet you don't. So, just imagine it over a 50-year career. You definitely don't. So you start with that. They don't know that they have these things, and then overlay who they are, what they've done, their journey and impact, and whatever it happens to be. There are meaningful things about various relationships or things like that. Stuff that really should not see the light of day. And we just take that very seriously. There are a lot of wow moments. And I think that's where we are grateful. We're humbled by that because there's an energy to many of these artifacts, which may sound a little bit kooky, but there have been times when we sat there and just held something, and you, you just, you feel it.

It's just, it's weird because it is so culturally meaningful. And you're like, this is it. It's a Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of moment in some ways.

LP: To go back to something you said a few minutes ago on the Invenium side, the business model is a menu of services. It's everything from research, archiving, and cataloging to restoration services or chain of custody documents. We can do all these different things so that at the end of it, we have this fully articulated grasp of what we have and can do with it. Is Invenium's model like a menu of services that someone can pick and choose from and have as much of the service as they want?

Brad Mindich: For sure. And because everybody's different, right? And some clients will say, I just want everything safe. We saw this a lot with clients with the fires in California, and some things got too close to home, like literally too close to home. And so we just took everything; it's stored and safe.

And we see this more with estates, but not all the time. But just as an example, the family just needs to get a handle on what's there. They don't know what they want to do, but they need everything organized. So, at least, they make some decisions at some point. Great. Other clients might say, "I want you to go through everything I have. I want you to figure out what to do with it, and I want you to do it." So we say, okay, but it's fluid. It's flexible. The foundation of it is super-serving our clients. That is the thing. And in an industry that isn't known for integrity and doing what you say you will do and looking out for the artist first or whatever, we pride ourselves on that because it's the foundation of looking at authentic content and the responsibility around that of journalism and reporting and all of that.

And what's the meaning behind this and connecting with audiences is that commitment to. Again, as I said, super-serving our client is, I hate when people say this word, but it's like it's in our DNA.

LP: I think another thing that fans or the public don't necessarily fully understand, and there's no reason they should, is the volatility of an artist or a celebrity's life and career. There are the obvious things like if you're an athlete, you move a lot between cities, or if you're a music star with any longevity in your career, you might've had drug and alcohol issues, or you just were itinerant, you know, you were a working musician. And then you layer in things that the public doesn't necessarily see, like divorces, families breaking up, and management changes.

I even think down to the level below that, like how many management offices, the only way they run it all is because of assistants. And then you have such a high turnover there. One assistant managed things one way in a spreadsheet, and another manager did it differently in a different spreadsheet or used a notebook or Google Docs. And all of a sudden, there's boxes of stuff everywhere. Very few rock stars begin their careers by saying, let's make sure we keep everything organized for the end of days. And it's almost shocking that we get archival releases because the stuff is so dispersed and not properly cared for. It's amazing.

Brad Mindich: I think you sort of summarized the variations with all this because it is about whether it's turnover, different managers, or we sent this to the label and what the label did with it, or all those things. And it depends on the client. We do have some clients who may not have kept everything in order; that's an understatement. They didn't keep things in order, but they kept things in boxes. They just kept throwing stuff in boxes in storage areas because they didn't know what to do, obviously not with everything, but with good chunks. It is a kind of process of following breadcrumbs and connecting the dots in a lot of ways.

And clients are trying to find that lost tape or whatever it is or some kind of thing. And I think the other seedy side is that people steal things, right? And that's the stuff. And we've had multiple occasions over the years where a client would see something up for auction and be very upset, whether it's a former bodyguard or a this or whatever. And there, people can auction wherever they want, whether it's theirs or not. And just the discussions with the client around where they say, what do we do about this? And it's like, can you prove that the guy stole it? Can you prove he didn't get it the way he got it? Because if you can't, it's his. You can buy it and be the highest bidder, and you can do it or try to make a separate deal.

There's a lot of that that we see and just things that belong in the hands of the artists that are part of the creative process that are not, and it's unpleasant.

LP: There was an artist I worked with who, unbeknownst to the outside world, was the largest private collector of his material and employed a part-time person who bought and sold stuff on eBay. So if the artist had 10 of something, they might sell one at a time on eBay to raise funds to buy other things. Ultimately, he was into things like bootlegs and fan art, which were derivative, like anything that people made using his image or marks, and he had a massive collection. He often tried to get duplicates and have two of everything, but it was a real thing, and it ended up being tens and tens of thousands of pieces in the collection. The way the artist's mind works is really interesting.

Brad Mindich: I love that. That is unique. (laughter)

LP: We could talk off-mic about that. I'll give you some more color on it. But, um, I wanted to zero in on this idea of value because you indicated earlier, when describing what Invenium does, that there may be an ideation or a product development component. Okay, now we know what you have, who owns what, and what you have the rights to or who has what rights to what. Here's what you might do with it. Something I have found, and I'm curious about your experience here, is that it's very difficult sometimes for the artist and their team to properly perceive the value of something, meaning they both under and overvalue it.

So, certainly, on the content side, like the art itself, the recorded media, there's often a reason why something didn't come out (laughter) in the past. Bands might want it, but the artist is like, that was a working copy, or I abandoned that for a reason. Other times, they're shocked at what's in there. Like, what? We recorded every show on that tour on DAT? Let's just dump it all into Spotify. That's amazing. And everything in between throwback and authentic merchandise, not even recreating it. You have artists who are part of their merch deals; they got 10 of everything. And as you said, they all just went into boxes.

And then one day you open the box, and it's like, "We have 10 of everything from the 1985 world tour. Oh my God," you know, can you speak at all to the ranges of feedback you get? What poses the biggest challenge in terms of productizing or taking something to market?

Brad Mindich: From a value standpoint, there are some clients, and I would say this is pretty common in an interesting way, who don't understand the value because they created it. It just doesn't mean anything to them, right? Because they're like, and I've heard clients be like, why would anybody care about this? So I hear that more often than you might expect, and my answer is typically, "I understand why you don't care because you created it; it's yours, whatever, this is part of your life, it's who you are."

But fans have never seen this. Unless you put yourself in that fan's perspective, you'll never understand the value. But as a fan, for me to see, hey, this was the album cover that was never used, this is your actual laminate from this, this is this, whatever, you don't care about it. Why would you care? You lived it. But as a fan, I've never seen it. And you're welcoming me into your world through these artifacts and the related stories that drive extraordinary value, right? And I would say most of the time, when you frame it like that to a client, they start to see it differently. They may or may not agree with you, but at least they understand their perspective and then say, okay, fine, well, you do what you think you need to do with this.

There is the other part where clients have an unrealistic expectation of value. So they might say, well, this guitar should be worth this. And it's like, okay, should is an interesting word to use here. I agree with you that it should be, given the particular market. It's just not. Sometimes, those are challenging conversations with clients, but whether we do something directly or work with an auction partner, we know everybody in that space. If somebody comes back who says, "Oh, well, I could auction this for you." Whatever, I'm just picking auction as an easy example.

And we think that we'll get a thousand dollars for this guitar. I will go back to the client and say, "I can't even go down this road in good conscience. I recommend you try to even go down this road. It's just not worth it. Just hold onto it." Somebody says it's a million dollars. Maybe that's a different story. And perhaps that aligns with where you think it should be. But if it's low, let's just rethink what we should do with this and try to provide the right sort of guidance to protect their artifacts and their brands. So that's the other critical thing: providing a comprehensive thought process around what you're doing and why you're doing this.

Why do you want to sell this? Or for us being able to say to an artist, this is why we think we should do this with this particular artifact. So I guess where the value discussions come into play, fans buy stories. It's not just the stuff. Something with a unique story attached to it will drive value, interest, and engagement. And I think that's part of our archival and curation process. It's like, "Let's understand the meaning behind this. How does this connect to other things?" Whether something gets sold or reproduced or not, it almost doesn't matter, but you must have a story process, which is an extensive process.

We tend to say the archival work is literal and figurative heavy lifting like it is. But you have to go through it and do it, and that's why we have so many people on our team, and this is what they do.

LP: In the Definitive Authentic world, it seems like right now, at least in the public-facing websites that you have up for artists, whether it's Mötley Crüe or Metallica or those are more like exhibitions and less like gift shops, if you will.

Brad Mindich: Absolutely.

LP: What's the business model? What's the why? Is it just to drive engagement with the stuff? Or is it like, this is what's out there, and we'll see what people are interested in? We'll start to make products. Like, where does this all go?

Brad Mindich: We're very conscious about these kinds of museum experiences that we've created, whether it's for Metallica or Mötley or Leppard or Bon Jovi or whomever others that are coming out, in the sense that these aren't money grabs. So it's not just come on here and buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. There's a merch site to do that. There are things you can buy from any museum. So there's the gift shop, right? It's like "exit through the gift shop." You can buy a few things created from this unique, special, and limited material.

And that's the lane that we live in. So it's a combination of revenue generation and engagement with superfans, the most passionate fans, or those who want to discover things. And for the artists, we've seen the connectivity that these types of experiences, whether, and we've done physical ones as well, but whether digital or physical, that just pulls fans in.

The artists are showing you things you've never seen before, like, "Come in, look at these things, comment, share, tell your friends, do all this," which is amazing for the artist. It's great for them, and it's great for the fans because we see this across socials. "Can you believe these are the handwritten lyrics?" or "This is the photo!" Fans love it. This is fan behavior right at its core, and that's really what we're dealing with is the nature of fan behavior, so we combine that with the opportunity for fans to own a piece of this you in a way they hadn't been able to before.

It's an organic, constantly evolving thing. So it's not like we launch this and then take it down. No, this keeps going because this does connect a client's past, present, and future. And that's the nature of what we do. The business model is good for the clients. It's good for us. And it, again, sounds very sappy, but everybody wins.

LP: There's this notion of passive income, and this is almost like passive marketing or passive engagement. If you put enough of this material out there at scale, the marketing does not necessarily take care of itself, but like the engagement drives the marketing. Like fans will say, "Oh my God, I haven't seen this t-shirt since 1983," or "Wow, this is the backstage pass, it's so cool." And then they're out there showing each other, talking about it, reposting it, and the artist doesn't have to feed it constantly.

Brad Mindich: Correct. And I think the other critical thing is that it is authentic. We use this word a lot inside and outside when we talk to others, but that can't be overstated because it is this authentic relationship between the artist and the fan that we are nurturing and at levels of going to shows or buying the records a critical piece of that right extraordinarily critical piece probably the most important pieces of it but this supports all of it. It's all for the artists and the fans that these are other playgrounds for them to live in. It works exactly like that as fans share again. This is fan behavior, right? " I love this band; I know you love this band. I gotta show you this. Have you seen it?" We're just giving fans thousands and thousands of things to share with other fans.

And it's a virtuous cycle, right? It just keeps positively feeding itself.

LP: We regularly discuss this on the podcast. I like to use the line that people forget fans are short for fanatics. And there's a lot that is implied in that. And what does a fanatic do, right? It's emotional; it's highly engaged. You want to be first, or you want to be in the know, or there's just an intensity around a fanatic and around fandom that, if harnessed correctly, can be very exciting and productive. Now, it's also a live wire that, if you touch it the wrong way, you're in a lot of trouble. It's easy to make mistakes.

It is to activate those people in the wrong way, alienate them, or exploit them. But it makes for a dynamic environment when it's all harnessed properly and fed correctly. My experience has been, not totally, but I think a vague truism is that artists don't typically like to write checks. They're much more used to getting checks. I'm wondering what that means in terms of your business model. Do you find it easy to get them to pay for this stuff? That's sort of question one, and 1A is whether it relates to who's willing to pay or not. Are there any discernible differences between the verticals you operate in, either the mindset of an athlete versus an artist or the needs of a different type of celebrity?

Brad Mindich: So, at first, the word easy's usually used, like it's never easy. Nothing is ever easy to get people to do. Pay for things. But the difference between this and this is that we are not just providing this transactional thing, right? What we do has multiple benefits for a client. And the reality is that everybody has to do this at some point. It's just a question of when. You will have to do it. It's very expensive to go backward. So, the sooner you do it, the better. And because we have models that help clients generate revenue during this process. They start to see the return on this, even from what we're doing from a monetization side.

But also the things that we do in allowing clients to see what they have and how things relate to each other in a very organized way, separate from us, those things go into a box set, they go to a merch company, they become a documentary, they become a book, all these things that must start with this process. So, the value we bring is not a single one-to-one value. If we do this, we'll create memorabilia or whatever, then sell it. We are giving you control over your world and creative legacy, however long it's been. And this will sound like I'm emphasizing for a fact, but there's almost no price to put on that.

Because if something happens and bad things happen, homes burn down, and there are floods and whatever, that stuff is gone. We encourage our clients, and I'll say this: I'm like, "Do it with somebody. If you don't want to do it with us, do it with somebody internally, hire somebody to do it because you need control over your things. Because that will allow you peace of mind, allow you to figure out what you should be doing creatively, and just protect your artifacts, history, legacy, and stories." And again, there is almost no value that you can put on it. And then sort of your 1A question with it is, there are differences in the nature of the artifacts we're dealing with and some of the client's goals.

But the process is the same. And it does start from, okay, here's what you have. You may not understand that it says value. We're going to explain to you why it does. Here are the things you can do with it. Let us put it into some sort of order and then help you creatively as you like, whether engaging with fans or generating new revenue for yourself, your nonprofits, or whatever it happens to be. But it's a deeply collaborative relationship with the client, regardless of whether they're an athlete, actor, artist, brand, or what have you. The results are meaningful for the client and their audience.

LP: That's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for making time. I could do another two or three hours on all this. It's the personal and professional intersection of interests here is pretty amazing. So maybe we could talk again at some point, but thank you for making time.

Brad Mindich: I would love to. I'm very grateful that you included me here. It's great to see you again and connect with you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk across all these different areas. It was very enjoyable.