THE MUSIC BUSINESS: “REPUTATION OVER FAME”

Musician and label owner, Blake Morgan, discusses the Music Business and the importance of “Reputation over Fame.”

Ever wondered how musicians really make money? It’s a tough journey filled with losses and small wins, but it’s all about persistence! In this episode, Blake Morgan shares that every small gamble counts, and eventually, one big win can turn it all around.: “The people who are “for real” have no choice.”

https://youtu.be/j8vf5dI-cbE

Transcript

Frazer Rice (00:01.135)
Welcome aboard, Blake.

Blake Morgan (00:02.946)
Good to be here.

Frazer Rice (00:04.111)
Well, it’s really nice for you to be here. You were nice enough to invite me to your show, your residency downtown. And I was glad to reconnect and remind myself how talented A, that you are and B, that musicians are. And it got me thinking about business and how musicians and the world of music works these days. So it’s a treat to have you on there.

Blake Morgan (00:27.714)
Thanks so much. I’m glad you could make it to the show and it’s great to talk to you again.

Frazer Rice (00:32.155)
So let’s start at the beginning. So if you’re a musician, you’ve been bitten by the bug, you’re talented, and you get that wonderful curse, what are the ways that musicians really make money and support themselves? I imagine it goes from a spectrum of busking and performing and having your guitar case open and taking…

donations from there on up to the professional musician and then to the actual creator of the music itself. How do you think about that?

Blake Morgan (01:01.858)
Right. So, you know, I think I’m thinking about your audience and finance people and business people, you know, right off the bat, of course, for starters, the marriage between commerce and art has always been, shall we say, an interesting one, or it’s been it’s been a conflicted one. And it’s mostly been conflicted for the artists. But the reality is, you know, I think

Frazer Rice (01:22.747)
Sure.

Blake Morgan (01:32.897)
in a lot of ways and I do have something of an eagle eye view because I’m an artist, I’m a songwriter, I’m a record producer and I’m a record label owner. And so whether you’ve had a career and are having one like I am or like the person that you’re imagining who’s just getting, who’s just starting out, I think your experience basically it’s very similar to quantitative finance.

in that you’re acquiring a lot of small bets that rarely pay off, but when one does, they make up for all the other losses. And every part of being a musician is very much that experience. So when you’re first starting out, whatever that means, if you’re making, if you’re building tracks on your laptop, if you’re, you know, I think the days of busking on the street are,

probably behind us because I don’t see it very much, honestly, in New York. And we can talk about why we don’t see it very much later. But the reality is however you’re getting into it, you’re immediately in a position where you know you’re going to be taking a loss. And what you’re hoping is that there will be a payoff at some point so great that it will pay for all or most or some of your losses that you’ve

Frazer Rice (02:30.203)
Right.

Blake Morgan (02:58.414)
crude. And the truth is that really never ends. And I think that that really also kind of never ends if you’re a superstar. That’s really that’s that’s that’s the gig. I don’t see I don’t see billionaire investors usually sort of hang up their investment coat jacket. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t see them hang up their cape and say, I’m out. You know, they’re still trying to somehow leverage what they have into something else.

Frazer Rice (03:20.279)
Bye.

Blake Morgan (03:27.822)
And so that’s the financial part of it, which is that, you know, I think especially now, if you were talking about the beautiful curse, like I think especially now there is this feeling in music that musicians make music, you know, for fun. And I’ve never, I’m not a musician who makes music for fun. I’ve never met a musician who makes music for fun. We make music because we’re compelled to. That’s the beautiful curse. It’s not because, hey, I’ve got

I’m thinking about doing this and it’s just the people who are for real have no choice. And so I often say that my relationship to making music, and this was true when I was a kid, when I was just starting, my relationship to making music is exactly like my relationship to breathing, which is that I really like doing it. But if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter because I’d still have to do it to be alive. It’s a part of who I am, right?

Frazer Rice (04:21.403)
Sure.

Blake Morgan (04:23.894)
And the thing about breathing is we aren’t in a position to being like, how’s the breathing industry? How am going to leverage my breathing into some sort of better form of breathing that would keep the lights on? We’re all doing that, I guess, with our lives in some form. But that’s that awkward marriage of commerce and art, which is that our strength as artists, as musicians, comes from the fact that we have an absolute bedrock. We are compelled, a bedrock need.

to continue to make music no matter what, no matter what’s thrown at us. And then that’s also exploited because the people who exploit us know that we’re still gonna do it no matter what, in whatever form that takes. So that was like 20 pounds of answer to a one ounce question. But that’s the real truth, which is I think if you’re starting out, you really are hoping that

you’re gonna you’re gonna start trying things basically to get some kind of a career off the ground, some kind of path forward to be able to make more music, some path forward where you’re gonna be able to make music where you wouldn’t want to have to do something outside of your own profession. People don’t tend to set out to be in a profession with the overwhelming feeling like they’re gonna have another profession that they’re gonna have to have to pay for their bills for their actual profession.

Frazer Rice (05:52.611)
No question. How do you graduate from hobby to commitment in many ways?

Blake Morgan (05:53.39)
So.

Blake Morgan (05:58.734)
Exactly, exactly. And so right out of the gate, you’re hoping that your ideas and your talent and your perspiration and your inspiration are going to be enough to leverage the next moment and the next moment and the next moment. Moments where you know, and you know, a 13 year old who’s trying to write their first song or pick up a violin and practice, they know that they’re going to lose and lose and lose.

and lose and they’re hoping that somewhere down the line they win and that pays for these losses and this is financial a financial truth and an emotional truth to like I’ve taken I often say to people like I’m a good humored person generally speaking but like I’m 96 % scar tissue at this point and so I still the joy offsets the scar tissue right I don’t want to be bitter and and and I’m and I’m not but

Frazer Rice (06:47.62)
you

Blake Morgan (06:56.969)
The moments of artistic wonder and satisfaction, just like the moments of financial hope, like, my God, this actually is hitting or this actually works. This really gets the monkey off my back to be able to do more of this, right? It’s very, very much the same, whether it’s financial, emotional, or temporal. The time you’ve put in to try to do something pays off when it works.

Frazer Rice (07:26.731)
So this massive investment, time, emotion, skill, dollars, et cetera, what are the ways that you start to get into the green and turn it into a situation where you’re actually sort of making money on what you love here?

Blake Morgan (07:47.832)
So if there was an easy answer to that, I would hope that you would have it and you could teach me what it was, but there’s a complicated answer to it. And it’s harder than ever. Art and music are devalued more than ever. The rungs under the ladder of where I’ve been able to get in my career have been kicked out. It’s harder for people to get to where I am. The world has changed because of piracy and streaming and

Frazer Rice (07:52.89)
Right.

Blake Morgan (08:16.043)
now AI and you know, we can touch on all of these things. But I do think that there’s an important panacea that will lift every facet of this. And in a world where we’re seemingly fixated on followers and likes and streams and these kinds of numbers, the reality is the place that I get paid

As a label owner, as a record producer, as an artist, as a singer, as a guitar player, as a bass player, as a piano player, all the jobs I have, the place that I get paid is that I have a reputation. And we live in a fame-obsessed business, music, and a fame-obsessed culture, but reputation and fame are not the same thing. And…

When you’re in, for lack of a better way to describe it, when you’re living in sort of in a Mad Max world, the music world has turned into this kind of wasteland in a lot of ways, unfortunately. When you can prove that you know where the fresh water is and you have some fuel for your car, you know how to evade the raiders on the highway, when you actually have a reputation.

Frazer Rice (09:28.603)
You

Blake Morgan (09:35.278)
there’s any numbers of ways that that winds up being valuable. And that could be a reputation of just being an incredibly professional singer who on short notice can go and sing a national anthem. That can be a reputation to say, we’ve been trying to make this record for months. We can’t get out of our own way. We’re screwed. We need someone who actually is from the before times who knows how to make a freaking record as opposed to just generating one. Right?

Frazer Rice (09:48.581)
Mm-hmm.

Blake Morgan (10:04.683)
Why would you go to a doctor? You’d go to a doctor because you need something. You can’t do it yourself. Home dentistry, bad idea. Home lobotomy, bad idea. And then you’re going to say, well, which one of these doctors has a reputation that I could trust to put this part of my life in their hands, right? So I think that’s always been true for musicians to some degree, but as other opportunities to make money.

Frazer Rice (10:12.187)
Home, home, home heart surgery. Yeah, not great.

Blake Morgan (10:32.961)
have really just evaporated. think for me personally, in my musical life and in my music business life, as a label owner and a label runner, it’s our reputation that matters most. if I’m gonna be honest, like we don’t really look for artists. We don’t look for business opportunities. They come to us and I don’t mean that in any other way than the exact words I’m using.

It’s the reputation that’s the calling card, and you can’t have one until you build one. And so there’s an irony where all of those speculative bets that you’re making that turn out to be losses, along the way, if they’re consistent and they paint a picture of a vision or a plan, in whatever way you’re a musical artist,

Over time, that’s the temporal part of it, over time, they have a chance to create a reputation and consistency. I think in music, three really important parameters are originality, quality, and consistency. And it’s the consistency that people drop the ball on. And it’s the consistency that is where the money is, because you have to be able to be counted on, whether you’re a session player or a label president.

Frazer Rice (11:47.013)
Sure.

Frazer Rice (11:55.772)
So many parallels in my sort of world too, where it’s, you know, sometimes you work on things that don’t amount to much, but the experience, it helps. It may not be immediately profitable, but somewhere down the line, maybe a future client, you know, has some sort of problem and either the connection you made to try to solve the previous issue comes to bear or, you know, just one guiding word puts them in the right frame.

Blake Morgan (11:58.891)
Of

Blake Morgan (12:19.948)
Sure. And we understand this and I think we just sort of inherently understand this in your part of the world. We would also understand this from a very, very good poker player. A very good poker player wins like 52 % of the time, 51%. There’s luck involved, there’s force majeure involved, but there’s also knowing that you’re going to over time

eke out that 1 % along the way of wins versus losses.

Frazer Rice (12:55.077)
So when you’re putting, as you own a label, you’re a successful musician, you grew up in it, and you’ve sort of absorbed the arrows of being in the industry from that view. Right. The evolution of forming a label and being there for musicians and providing the comfortable environment from which to.

Blake Morgan (13:08.197)
Hence the scar tissue, yes.

Frazer Rice (13:21.26)
have them develop what they’re doing, then you’re not in it for a hobby either. You need to be able to eat and live and be in New York and that type of stuff. Maybe take us through that journey a little bit.

Blake Morgan (13:32.47)
So I think the cliche is necessity is the mother of invention. And that’s true. For me, it was desperation. Desperation is also the mother of invention. And I had a big record deal at the beginning of my career. And parts of that really worked out and parts of that really didn’t. Bizarrely, the artistic part of it really worked out. I made a record I loved with people I loved. The record did well. It started my reputation. It didn’t do particularly well commercially or really at all.

but it was really good. And so immediately I was an artist who had made a really good debut record on an upstart label with major label distribution founded by Phil Ramone. So there’s reputation too. Phil Ramone. Well, he’s got a huge track record. and this young guy who’s starting out, he’s made a really good record with Terry Manning who made Led Zeppelin III, right? So there’s reputation there. And it was critically acclaimed.

Frazer Rice (14:15.612)
Mm-hmm.

Blake Morgan (14:30.134)
people definitely recognize that for a first time out, I hit the ball soundly, you know? And then some business parts to the label. The good part is that the label didn’t really know what it was doing. And so I got to do some things artistically that really paid off. The bad news is they didn’t know what they were doing. And so from a business standpoint, they made some poor decisions that also hurt the health of the record out in the world.

Frazer Rice (14:36.901)
All

Blake Morgan (14:59.242)
And soon after that, about a year or so after that, I really had to fight my way off that record label. And I did. Unacrimoniously, it was very complicated. was very painful for me because to follow through on that baseball, you know, image, you know, I felt like I was hitting white balls for batting practice. I was really getting somewhere. And then it felt like, I’m I’m back in the minor leagues. What do I do?

Frazer Rice (15:10.457)
but complicated and laborious and…

Blake Morgan (15:29.376)
And I, you know, my management at the time was like, we’re gonna get another record deal. It was very difficult for me because I actually knew that I’d gotten pretty lucky with that deal because I was able to do what I wanted to do artistically and it had worked. I felt that it was gonna sort of be the same thing. And I did get some offers, but they really weren’t A-list offers from A-list labels. It was gonna feel like a step down. And I was walking down the street here in Manhattan with my mother and I said, you know, I’m producing all of these demos for all these other artists.

you know, if I had any guts, I’d just start my own label. I wouldn’t ask permission from anybody to do this. And all the mistakes that would happen would be at my own, and I could learn from them, right? Our victories would be sweeter. And all these demos I’m producing, what if they weren’t demos? What if they were records? And we just figured out, I don’t know anything about how to do this, but what if I just had any guts, that’s what I would do. She said, yeah, you know, if you had any guts, that is what you would do.

And it wasn’t hostile, was just sort of like, okay, gauntlet thrown. I remember standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 11th Street and I put my hands on my knees and I just went, there’s gonna be like, all that scar tissue I had, you know, right? And that was really what it was. I really just didn’t have a choice. I didn’t feel that I was gonna get a record deal that was going to propel me forward. Really at the end of…

Frazer Rice (16:29.884)
Exactly.

Blake Morgan (16:55.116)
some of my rope and I did showcase the very last label showcase I did. My lawyer called me on a Friday at 6 p.m. and after days of not being able to get in touch with him and he was like oh yeah well you know the fallout from the showcase like listen man I don’t want to tell you to stop doing what you’re doing but you know hey you know all right cool all right man and I was like okay hung up the phone.

And I think that conversation with my mother was like the next day. Right? So it really just felt like I was out of options. And that’s a very, that is a place that any musician listening to this and any musician I’ve ever met is familiar with in one form or another. The orchestra I’ve been playing with is going out of business. My band’s breaking up. What do I?

I, my recording studio burned to the ground. Whatever the emergency is, it feels like, my God, this is it. This is that evolutionary moment where I can’t, I can’t move forward.

Frazer Rice (18:00.668)
Yeah, you’ve got to cross the Rubicon because you’ve got 10,000 troops about ready to stab you in the back if it doesn’t work.

Blake Morgan (18:06.922)
Right. Exactly. And so I started a label on my laptop on like a Wednesday. It had the right spirit. And all those people I was recording with in those early days, we put out records. We printed CDs and we posted it online. And this was prior to the streaming era, but in the iTunes era, you know, the download era.

And it’s grown since then and basically the commitment has never stopped, which is trying to elevate the music of artists I believe in, records I believe in, and trying to find a Mad Max way to keep that work alive and keep the artists who are making that work alive so that we can make more stuff, so that we can actually operate in our profession, right?

Frazer Rice (18:57.8)
When you start the label and you’ve got artists that you’re supporting and helping them create and they’re looking at you to be the business end and really the distribution end, I guess. How did you learn that part? I mean, you knew a little bit from your previous experience and some of the scar tissue that you built up over that. How did you get to the point where you could get the music distributed, make that sort of saleable? And I guess the follow-up question is, then the streaming

component kicks in and you have to kind of relearn a whole different thing.

Blake Morgan (19:29.269)
Sure. So how did I look the first part of your question? How did I learn that I started with two things. The first is I learned immediately from the mistakes that the record label I had been on had made. They had put me on the back cover of Billboard magazine. They spent one hundred thousand dollars to put a full back cover ad for me on Billboard to make a splash. And they thought I’d be thrilled. And I was horrified because the cost of that one ad that would be in that magazine for one week.

Frazer Rice (19:42.129)
Mm-hmm.

Blake Morgan (19:57.91)
could have put me on the road for two years. So financial responsibility, we’ve got to rub two nickels together and come up with a plan. So I learned from all of their mistakes. And I tried to answer every question that I had about how I was going to do this with what would I want if I was an artist on this label? wait a minute. I am an artist on this label. So what would I want my label to explain to me? What was so painful to me with the lawyers and managers and labels that I had worked with in the past? Lack of communication.

lack of transparency, lack of clarification. What does that mean? Having artists in all the meetings. Even to this day, Monday, we have all of our artist meetings, 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock, one o’clock. And once a week, I talk to every artist I work with and explain to them what’s going on. Right? And that’s good business sense because then the artists know and you’re building trust and you also are on the same page about what the plan is. In terms of

How did I get our first real distribution? It was reputation. A small distributor with larger distribution behind them cold called and said, you’re putting out this record that you made with Leslie Gore. Do you have physical distribution for it? And I said, no. And they said, would you like some? I was like, well, what would that look like? We started talking. And that led to digital distribution once the streaming era began.

you know, somewhere in 2011, 12, something like this. We rebranded our label from Engine Company Records to ECR Music Group because we started signing smaller labels. We’d grown to a certain size and these labels didn’t know what they were doing. And they saw that we were doing, what we were doing was working even just 1%. Well, can we help, can we get, so once again, it’s reputation and it’s exemplifying

forward motion at whatever speed that is, know, Tom Waits once said there’s no status quo in the music business. There’s you’re either moving up or you’re moving down and Even if you’re moving up One mile an hour or one millimeter higher You’re moving up and people can feel that and so it was really reputation that got us our first legitimate distribution which kind of broke us into the the new shape that this label

Blake Morgan (22:28.135)
was in and now we’ve been with the Orchard for years. We left that smaller distributor and the Orchard is, you know, is Sony Music. So it’s major label distribution for this fiercely independent boutique record label in Greenwich Village.

Frazer Rice (22:43.288)
So one of the things growing up sort of did some work really more academic on the music industry and you know the distinction between you know the sort of performing and where the revenue comes from that the mechanicals used to be CDs and records and so on and now streams and then the copyright the songwriting the let’s call it the sheet music or intellectual property behind the song

and then the merchandise, is sort of a spillover way to make money with, you for a musician. As a label owner and the, I guess the first question is how does it really break down in terms of, you know, selling of streams, and which is how most people consume their music now versus the use and exploitation, and I mean that in a good way, of the copyright slash sheet music.

How do you think about that in terms of sort of your overall strategy?

Blake Morgan (23:41.323)
So it’s different for every artist because every artist’s reputation is different, where they’re at on that ladder is different. There used to be a playbook that you could run and it would vary based on audience reaction, based on an artist. There used to be at least some kind of playbook that you could run that you would tailor. And I guess there still is, but not really. It’s more like a cheat sheet or a bullet point list and you’re really trying things.

Frazer Rice (23:51.484)
Mm-hmm.

Blake Morgan (24:10.622)
And I often think of an image of a balloon animal. You know, it’s like you squeeze, where if you squeeze it here, you know, it pops out over here and then you squeeze it here and it pops out over there, you know? And trying to make money in the music business is exactly like that, except it’s the opposite. It’s the downward pressure squeezes here and squeezes here and you’re more and more compacted. So the old revenue streams, even Spotify when they launched, they’re like, you don’t have to make money or

and certainly piracy, the Napster crisis was like, don’t need money on this, just sell t-shirts. And this is an argument back from 2006 and 2007. We’re not going to revisit that. streaming, just so your listeners understand, the math with streaming is it takes a million streams to generate about $3,500 of total revenue. A million streams, $3,500.

Right? So you need something like four or 500,000 streams a month to make minimum wage. It’s a minimum wage job. And by the way, 400, 500,000 streams a month is a large number. So that’s not a legitimate revenue stream. It’s something. Right. It’s nowhere close. It’s something.

Frazer Rice (25:33.02)
No more clothes.

Blake Morgan (25:38.632)
Now if you’re an artist who is built up

something of a following where Where and I mean like if you’re an artist from the before times if you grew up in the major label system And you’ve gone indie if you grew up, you know And you are someone who can do smaller shows where you’re selling vinyl or CDs or t-shirts or something You can still do that, but that’s not break the bank money either that’s something else

So again, what you’re really doing is you’re cobbling together all of these different things, and then you’re hoping for, my God, my track is in a major television show. It’s in a movie. It’s in the trailer of a movie. You’re trying any way to push back against this reverse balloon animal of pressure, because each of these revenue streams, the revenue from songwriting, the revenue from performing,

Frazer Rice (26:31.536)
Right.

Blake Morgan (26:38.954)
80 % of small venues in this country have gone out of business. 50 % of professional musicians have gone out of business in the last 10 years. 80 % of professional songwriters have gone out of business. And this is all prior to the arrival of AI, which is an existential threat, to all of the means that musicians use inside their profession to continue to move forward so that they can do what they most want in that profession.

Right. So there isn’t a really clear answer. But here with the label and just in my own career as president of the label, but also as an artist, you came to see me at a very well attended show in Greenwich Village. I’m not making money at that show. I got to pay my band. The venue takes a cut as they need to. You have to publicize the show. We spent more money publicizing the show. Then I could possibly make it the show even before I pay my band or pay for rehearsals. Right. But what am I doing?

I’m making a speculative bet. It’s quantitative finance. I know I’m going to lose money at that show. But the reputation from the show will build it in a way where someone’s going to want me to produce their record or they’re going to want to come or an artist of a different size is going to want to come aboard the label. Or one of our artists recently, the National Hockey League called and wanted her to sing the national anthem at All-Star Games for their All-Star tournament.

So there it is. It’s like you’re making all of these bets that are losing, boom, something happens. Okay, well that paid for that. It’s a good example of that, you know? But each of those streams that you mentioned, each one of them hasn’t dried up completely, and it is different for each artist, but every one of them has dried up substantively, if that makes sense.

Frazer Rice (28:28.526)
So we’ve already busted through what I thought would be a great time limit here, because I could talk about this for three hours. But let’s dive into the AI and maybe some of the technological aspects that threaten other creative pursuits by introducing, let’s call it cheap skill, into the creative process. How do you defend yourself against that? How do you, on one hand, think AI, you know,

brings lots of people into it, but then the value of authenticity and what I would call quote unquote actual skill skyrockets if you position it correctly. How are you thinking about supporting your artists and defending them going forward?

Blake Morgan (29:09.022)
Well, think, sure, you know, this is not my line, but I think it’s the best line that I’ve heard to describe AI. The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled any ability to access wealth.

Frazer Rice (29:30.917)
the

Blake Morgan (29:32.36)
That’s it. And to pretend that it’s anything other than that is really just to pretend. Right. We don’t need music teachers. We’re just going to have AI teachers. We don’t need you the proponents. Of this advancement. I’m making air quotes for the people who aren’t watching this. You know they know exactly what they’re doing right. But that’s what it is right. It’s it’s to give it’s to give.

Frazer Rice (29:53.584)
Right.

Blake Morgan (30:03.464)
It’s to allow wealth to access all of the skill that we’ve spent our lives accruing while removing from us the ability to accrue wealth. And the second part of that does not have to be necessary. I mean, the first part doesn’t have to be necessary either, AI is a tool that can possibly change the course of our species in a positive way.

but it doesn’t have to rob us of our humanity. And I do think that that is very much what’s happening. Everybody knows that there’s about 100,000 tracks that are uploaded every day to streaming services, 100,000 tracks every day. But there’s another 150 to 200,000 tracks that are now being uploaded every day that are just generated by AI.

This is bad on so many levels. It’s bad for musicians. Bad for recording studios. It’s bad. But I’ll even skip over all of that. It’s just bad for us. Because the greatest power I have as an artist is that I have the power to make you feel something. And I use the word make because I mean it. I have the power to get you to have a feeling involuntarily by a piece of music if I know what I’m doing and if I do my job well.

And part of the feeling is your understanding as a listener that I’ve experienced something that speaks to something that you’ve experienced. Our humanity is brought closer. Music unites us.

Blake Morgan (31:46.408)
And when you listen to an AI track, however deft its mimicry is of the Beatles or the Stones or of Nina Simone or of Beethoven or of anybody, that is fundamentally lacking because it wasn’t generated by an individual or a group of individuals who had a human experience and who are then speaking to that experience and speaking it out loud so that you can experience it so that you’ve shared something so that you become united. And that’s what’s

the most dangerous thing in music. And of course it’s dangerous financially and of course it’s existentially from a how is this all going to work standpoint from a business perspective. But at the heart of any healthy business is some piece of humanity that then draws people to that business and makes them want to do it. And you know I think that that people talk about AI in terms of theft.

and in terms of mimicry and you know what it actually reminds me of, Frazier, it reminds me of that 70s movie that Charlton Heston was in, Soylent Green, and I don’t mean to spoil the movie for people, but if you haven’t seen the movie by now, it’s been out for a while. It’s 50 years old and it’s a dystopic vision of the future in this movie where people are starving, but the city and the government is feeding people with a substance called Soylent Green and it comes in these tablets and these little bars and everything.

Frazer Rice (32:54.492)
It’s 50 years old. think people can find it out.

Blake Morgan (33:13.581)
And it’s revealed towards the end of the movie that Soylent Green is actually made out of people. And that’s the famous line, you know, it’s, it’s people, it’s made out of people. Well, that’s what AI is doing. That’s what these people want to be doing. It’s not so much that they’re stealing us. They are, they’re feeding us back to ourselves.

Frazer Rice (33:21.638)
It’s people,

Frazer Rice (33:34.652)
No, and you can’t algorithm a soul, which is, think the…

Blake Morgan (33:35.953)
It’s so… Exactly, exactly. And the people who think that you can, I’m sorry, because I’m a big fan of humanity and I’m a big fan of empathy. It’s very difficult to muster some humanity and empathy for the people who think that that’s a good idea. That these people who think that you can algorithmically produce a soul.

are the very people who were so unbelievably boring in junior high school and high school that they never formed a band and they never went to theater workshop and they never decided to try stand-up comedy and they didn’t go to the cool party and they really, it’s like they have this chip on their shoulder, but it’s not a chip on their shoulder because they wish they were cool too, although boy do they wish they were cool too. The chip on their shoulder, and I actually said this at the show that you were at, I think the chip on their shoulder is that artists and musicians specifically

Frazer Rice (34:18.172)
the

Blake Morgan (34:26.503)
especially when

You have a business mind and a cogent approach and attitude towards your own career as an artist. We have a unique power, which is that we really can unite people. We really can reach across barriers and bring our humanity into focus and bring what makes us human and what makes being alive

really worthwhile talk about a quantitative bet, right? For all that we all go through, we’d still rather be alive, generally speaking, than not, you know? And so I think that that is the existential threat to them, which is that we have this incredible power, whether we’re wealthy or not, whether we’re famous or not, to really make a difference in some people’s lives through music. And AI is not going to be able to do that.

But what AI is going, and no matter how smart or good it gets, it’s not gonna be able to do that. But what it is gonna be able to do is it’s going to be able to systematically remove the pieces that a musician is able to put together to form a career and to form that reputation and to form simply a methodology where you can keep the lights on and you can keep going. And that’s an existential threat.

to our business, just as it’s an existential threat to, you know, I know it’s a lot, but it’s not a hysterical thing. It is an existential threat to our humanity, which is what we’re all talking about. And it doesn’t have to be in a Terminator kind of way. It has to be.

Frazer Rice (36:15.842)
even worse, it’s death by a thousand cuts and you don’t see it coming. And all of a sudden you’re left with the carcasses of a lot of creative industries. I would even, you know, whether it’s law or accounting, maybe they don’t get a lot of credit for being, you know, fun and exciting, but, you know, we look in these spaces and AI is here to eat our lunch. And, you know, I’m not impressed with it yet, but I know it’s coming.

Blake Morgan (36:18.899)
Death by a thousand, that’s right.

Blake Morgan (36:41.277)
Right. think I think that objective truth and knowledge and expertise are good things and they’re all under attack. There is a violence being perpetrated against them. Expertise is a good thing. I remind people all the time. The word elite is a good thing. Elite is a good thing. An elite basketball player is that’s a good player. An elite surgeon. Once again this is a good thing. This means the best of. It doesn’t mean anything other than that.

You know, and skill and craft and art are some of the greatest and most wondrous achievements that human beings have been able to render. And I hope we get the chance to continue to do it.

Frazer Rice (37:26.566)
Well, as I like to hope, think and hope that that sort of creativity and authenticity, it’s the new beachfront property. In the sense, it’s not being made anymore. It can be under threat, but it’s extremely valuable. And when people see it and know it, they’re nourished by it. And I think, you know, that’s my hope is that as you keep going, keep going. It’s important.

Blake Morgan (37:34.696)
Yeah, I like that.

Blake Morgan (37:54.131)
Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. We’re probably just 1 % of 1 % into our AI journey, if that. But I can already feel that if I do something well on stage, already feels a little bit different. Like, wow, you’re really juggling those chainsaws. Huh. I mean, I’ve seen juggling chainsaws online, but I don’t know if it’s real or not. But I actually saw you do it.

And it’s not just the live experience, it’s making records, which we do here, making records that are made by people. It sounds like it. And it’s a very interesting thing when we get on a major playlist on Spotify or Apple and you listen to the other songs on that playlist, and then our track comes up, it does sound fundamentally different. That’s one of the reasons it does very, very well. Because whether people know it or not, or they dig into the story behind it or not, you know,

Listeners very often are like puppies, and I mean that in a good way. We all love puppies. something happens and they go, this doesn’t sound like all the other things that I, you know, this anodyne cookie cutter mimicked, soylent kind of thing. Right. This sounds this there’s actual food in this. Right. And so that’s part of our business model, too. You know, we’re not we’re not interested in being the embiggened bigness of the big thing.

Frazer Rice (39:08.901)
Exactly.

Blake Morgan (39:17.638)
We’re interested in being good and we’re interested in being the, you know, the Criterion Channel gives me so much hope in the cinema universe with all the Marvel movies out there that I love and all the Star Wars movies and shows that I love. I love that Criterion Channel is such a success. And they stream Truffaut and Hitchcock and Kurosawa and interviews with great directors and actors and cinematographers. It’s a huge success.

And that says something to me. That is a proof of concept for this record label. That’s what we’re trying to do in an indie rock and roll way here in Greenwich Village. That’s a business model.

Frazer Rice (39:57.946)
Really cool stuff. Blake, how do people find you?

Blake Morgan (40:00.968)
You can go to blakemorgan.com or I’m at the Blake Morgan on all social media come say hi

Frazer Rice (40:07.206)
Really good stuff. Blake, thanks for reaching back out. It was a treat to see you live. I mean, if you ever get a chance listeners and watchers to see Blake play, it’s terrific. And go out and buy music and go see the show. You’re supporting an important ecosystem.

Blake Morgan (40:26.63)
That means so much to me, especially coming from you. really appreciate it. It’s been great being here.

Frazer Rice (40:31.1)
Terrific. Thanks, Blake.

MY FIRST DISCUSSION WITH BLAKE ON ARTISTS RIGHTS

ARTICLE ON ARTIST MUSIC THEFT FOR AI TRAINING

https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Actually-Intelligent-Decision-Making-1-ebook/dp/B07FPQJJQT/