How the Fight for Artist Radio Royalties Became a Multi-Decade Battle w/ Michael Huppe

25:33I mean, that's actually a huge question. I don't know if there's like an EU. It's a great question and a hard question. I don't think there's a simple answer. You know, each territory is different. Each country is different. It is definitely the case that, you know, certain countries, the unions are stronger and have, you know, I mean, we have great unions in this country. They're both on our board. But, you know, there's just more of a union history like in France. You know, some of the first unions were probably created in France. or it might be the timing of just other interest groups was different.

26:05And the U.S. is also a little bit different. It's a very property rights driven culture. You know, capitalist America, which is great most of the time. It's like, are we going to devolve into a question about whether or not capitalism should exist? We'll have to be there for a long time. By the way, that would also be a very interesting discussion. No, capitalism is, look, the U.S. is the biggest market. And a lot of the success and the power of this country are no doubt due to the capitalist drive, whereas in other countries there are other forces, maybe cultural things occupy a different status.

26:45Yeah. France is a good example. Here's how I love to sum it up. In the rest of the world and a lot of the European countries or elsewhere, the music industry issues are overseen by the Ministry of Culture or the Minister of Industry or whatever it may be. In the U.S., you know who they're overseen by? Register of Copyrights? The U.S. Department of Justice. Oh. And that sort of tells you a little bit about just the relative importance of different things. You know, DOJ looking at things often from an anti-competitive angle and from an antitrust angle. We don't really have a minister of culture, right, like they do in many European countries.

27:23Yeah. So I just think music just occupies a different space in their culture. Not to say that music isn't hugely important in the U.S. It's just a different mindset. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, well, we haven't gotten into exactly what SoundExchange does and how it was established, so let's go there next. Tell me about the formation of SoundExchange in the 90s, correct? Well, we first started doing what we do in the 90s. Our current iteration was 2003. 2003. We were basically created by the music industry, and the main thing that we did then and do now is collect digital royalties for non-interactive streaming.

27:58So think about radio-like digital services, SiriusXM, iHeart Online, not over FM, as we just talked about, your cable TV. It was in the 90s where the music industry finally got some of this performance right for sound recordings. We had nothing prior to 1995. And so in 95, a law was passed that finally gave the recording industry the right to get some royalties when they're digital, only their recordings are streamed digitally. And if it's a non-interactive stream like SiriusXM where it's fed to you, you can't build a playlist, they can, if they so choose, file a piece of paper to the copyright office and then just use SoundExchange.

28:41So SiriusXM, for instance, does not have to go and license every sound recording ever created. They have access to it under federal law as long as they pay sound exchange and send us the data. And that's the bulk of what we do. And it's grown. When I first started working on this stuff, I think we were paying out$25 million a year. And now we regularly pay out over a billion dollars a year. Wow. Okay. And we're 12 % to 14%, somewhere around there, of the U.S. recorded music industry. revenue. So that's the bulk of what we do and what we're known for. We do other things too. We do administer some direct licenses that are out there.

29:20So a record label might do a deal with a service and we may administer some or all of that deal on the back end. And we also do a lot to make the industry work better. One of the things that's so frustrating is there's so much friction in this industry. When you think about how you license, if you want to license music, how the money flows, all the places you have to go, the data issues that stop the money from going where it needs to. It's very frustrating, and there's a lot of waste. So we do a lot of things to try and remove that friction in the industry by working on standards bodies about delivery of data and working on the data that underlies a lot of this.

30:00It's not the sexy part of the industry. Yeah, I was going to say there's probably going to be some people listening who are on the newer side to the music industry and might not really realize what a big difficulty it is to make sure that everyone is getting paid properly due to the fact that a lot of times when people release their music, they don't properly put, they don't check all the right boxes. They're not properly spelling the artist's name and every single songwriter's name and entering who owns what. And so it becomes very, very complicated. And it is a very important thing in the music industry, but it might not be something that a brand new artist who might be listening to this podcast would know anything about, but it will enter your life at some point.

30:38I'm pretty sure people don't join bands with the primary reason of having their metadata correct on some database somewhere. And you're right. And to be honest, we want artists and songwriters and producers, all the people that help create the music, I think we'd all be better off if they can spend more of their time practicing their craft and focus on the music. In fact, it's not an official tagline, but, you know, we talk about, you know, there's a saying we sometimes talk about at SoundExchange. You focus on the music, we'll take care of the noise. Oh, that's good. Did you come up with that?

31:14I wish I had, but I did not. This episode is brought to you by SoundExchange. Since 2003, SoundExchange has distributed more than$12 billion in royalties to a community of more than 800 ,000 recording artists and sound recording rights owners. SoundExchange makes it easy to collect the digital performance royalties you earn whenever your music is played in the U.S. and all available royalties abroad. With a growing portfolio of agreements with partner collective management organizations covering 90 % of the available global market, SoundExchange streamlines the complex administrative burden of international collections for nearly half a million artists and rights owners.

31:52Ready to register and find out more? Visit soundexchange.com to get started. And going back to kind of around the time that SoundExchange was formed, obviously the recorded music industry had grown up by that point in the 90s and digital was on its way. And so I imagine the reason why all of these things kind of started popping up is because of digital, right? Like they saw on the horizon that there were going to be these new technologies for delivering radio to people. And maybe that was an in. Was it easier for them to fight for what was happening in the near future than what was happening in the past?

32:26Was that like a conscious effort by the music industry? You're remarkably insightful. Seriously, like that is exactly. So, you know, I mentioned this multi-decade fight that the recording industry has had with the FM industry to try to get radio to pay. And in 1995, we finally got a digital right. And the reality I would tell you of why that happened is just politically that's what we were able to get through as an industry. But if you were to discern the intent of Congress and why did they give us just a digital right and not apply it to FM, the answer you would get is because exactly what you said.

33:06They saw the digital future. Napster was starting to kick around. I mean maybe – I guess the Napster really came onto the scene a couple years after that. And Congress's justification for why only digital was, wow, this could be a piracy problem. FM radio, back then, not so much, but they saw the ability of what digital could mean for piracy. One thing about analog piracy, when you go from tape to tape to tape to tape, it degrades. It's a much more labor-intensive and capital-intensive project. With digital, with the push of a button, you can create a million perfect copies. And by the way, take one of those and push a button, and you can create a million more perfect copies.

33:51So digital obviously had a lot of potential for the industry, but it also had the potential for piracy and theft. And that was the ostensible justification of why Congress gave us this limited digital right. One of the interesting things I always come back to on the show, if you've listened to most of the episodes, I've come back to this like probably three or four times, is that the primary or popular methods of consumption really do drive the kind of music that is made in the industry at that time. So for a while, radio was so dominant and so important for the music promotion process that, yeah, you did want to make a song that was three minutes, 30 seconds, cleanly fit into a radio format.

34:35I did this really interesting cover story on the artist Leve. Are you familiar with Leve? Not completely. I've heard that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she has like kind of a jazz pop blend to her music. And I did this cover story where I interviewed some of the people on her team about why she's become so successful now. And a lot of them were talking about how right now is a really interesting time for artists that don't fit cleanly within a certain genre. And I think, you know, historically, terrestrial radio, you had your few different formats that you could fit into. And Levy is not one of those people.

35:11Like, realistically, it would have been really hard for her to fit into one of those formats as someone who's blending jazz and pop, almost like a Nora Jones style kind of stuff. And they were saying that they're really grateful that she came up in a time of streaming. And that was a time that really allowed her to just be herself and not have to conform to any of that. But I feel like radio is getting more niche. With SiriusXM, I was exploring some SiriusXM stations in preparation for this interview because I haven't been on in a minute. I was listening to John Mayer's artist-centered radio station, the Beatles radio station.

35:46What are your normal SiriusXM presets? Okay, so I don't have SiriusXM, but my mom does. I'm sorry, what? I know. I'm sorry. You must not have a car. Well, I am in the car a lot. I'm kidding. I'm listening to my own podcast, you know. Of course, that's true. Podcasts are boom. It's basically talk radio. Yeah. 2.0, to be quite honest. I'm no different from - Talk radio with optionality. You can listen to it when you want. Yes. Yeah, yeah. But I was in my mom's car just home for Thanksgiving, and I was scrolling through all the channels, and I was shocked by just how many niches that they offer now.

36:24I'm wondering, do you think that that offers more opportunities for artists who are kind of not more traditional genre-specific artists? Absolutely. Again, you were spot on. You know, the old radio formats were very limited. And remember when, you know, such a big story of someone crossed over, right, from country to pop or from, you know, gospel to country or whatever it may be. That was this big, big thing. And that's – artists don't fit into neat little tiny boxes. They never have, and they sure as heck don't want to be fit into neat tiny boxes. So I agree with you that you kind of needed that to get on radio historically because they need to know where to place you.

37:06You don't need that on any of these other platforms. You know, another another interesting thing is you got to get people quicker because if you don't have something that, you know, hook early on or I mean, sometimes if people don't like the first 10 seconds of a song, there's there's a lot more incentive to switch, switch, switch around because there's so many options. So I think artists, you know, short form video is that's much shorter than than a four minute song or three and a half minute song is up and coming. And I think there's good and bad to that. You know, we could we could talk about that.

37:38It's just an observation. Short form, quicker hits and not having to fit into into a defined predefined genre. You know, genre is a tricky thing because even genres, what genre something is or how many genres there are is a subjective assessment. Some people think in terms of, you know, five or six or eight radio formats. Other people think in terms of 15 genres. But you could probably find some place that has 150 genres because to try to cover all the differences. Yeah. So you were just talking about how there are so many options now. so you have to hook listeners really quickly. One thing that I have noticed in kind of looking over media-based charts and trying to kind of examine where radio is at right now, it feels like radio stations, from my vantage point, are getting more and more safe with the choices that they make of what they put on the radio.

38:32It feels like the top 10 songs are just played over and over and over again. And especially if you look at comparing number one to number 10, that number one song gets played all the time. Yes, it does. And I imagine it wasn't always that way. When did you start seeing a shift where there was more kind of consolidation of the tracks that were being played on radio? Well, if you mean when did SoundExchange start seeing it, we've never had that. Because the interesting thing about SoundExchange, we have 3 ,500 services that report to us every month. And the beauty of the internet, among many things, is you don't have limited real estate, right?

39:10So if you live in a city and you want to get on an FM station, there's only so much bandwidth that the FCC has said can be for the commercial music radio station. And there's a limited number of slots, and they're often owned by big corporate radio giants, and it's really hard to get into those. You don't have that real estate limitation on the internet. So if you're in New York and you want to listen to, I don't know, Zydeco. There's probably not a Zydeco station in New York City. But guess what? You can listen to it now online. So we've never – sound change, we've always had a huge variety. But you are right.

39:49There is – at least my observation is there is less variety, and I think part of that is due to radio consolidation. Back in the days of – where DJs were permitted to sort of make their own decisions and you would go literally from DJ to DJ. If you've seen some of the movies about the record industry in the 50s and 60s, they would go DJ to DJ to DJ to DJ. Well, that's not really possible anymore because very few DJs have that type of discretion. More and more programming is coming out of the central server of a big radio conglomerate and fed out to their affiliates. And I think that naturally leads to less variety over the air.

40:29Which is a bummer, by the way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, is it becoming more data driven, just like everything else, where they're looking at the stats of like, okay, people tend to stay on the radio station. If we play this song, we're going to keep playing this one. I think so. I don't have any direct evidence of it. But how can it not be? I mean, the whole world's more data driven now. And at the end of the day, you know, most of these, especially these big commercial, you know, the I hearts of the world, they're driven to maximize profits, you know. And so I can't imagine that they're not looking at that type of data.

40:59Yeah. And when did radio consolidation start to come about? Because you've been referring to that a few times, but I don't exactly know when it went from radio stations being quite local to being something that is more of a national network. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, there was a telecommunications bill, I think it was 1996, that lifted a lot of the ownership caps. So historically, for public policy reasons, there were limits on how many radio stations you could own in a single market or how many stations and newspapers. Thinking that they didn't – they wanted to make sure there was a variety of sources for people to get music, to get their information, to get their news.

41:36So for public policy reasons, the FCC and others have always had limits on how much. In 1996, they lifted those limits to allow greater consolidation. And it's a fight that's still happening. And if you look at some of the National Association of Broadcasters, the NAB, some of their higher priorities right now on the radio side is to try and achieve even more consolidation. Or there are also limits, and I forget the term, but there's limits on overlapping programming, right? So how much of the same programming you can play in different DMAs, radio markets that overlap. And there are limits on that as well, again, to try to foster variety and diversity and allow more music to get on the air.

42:19And I think the NAB is also trying to loosen that so they can do more consolidation there as well. And they would probably say if they were in this chair, they're being forced to do that because of the industry and there's all these other competing platforms. And for commercial reasons, it's in their commercial interest to try to allow more consolidation so they can compete better with the online platforms and things like that. So I suspect that would be what they would say if they were sitting here. Yeah. I don't know if you caught this article, but there is a really interesting story in Rolling Stone.

42:53I think it was a couple months ago where it was basically profiling this radio station in Iowa. It was a heavy, like hard rock station. And they were giving some of their overnight shift slots to an AI radio personality. I did see that story Yeah, so it was this AI radio personality called DJ Tori And they even made an image for her Which I don't even think you need for radio But they did it anyway Where she has tattoo sleeves and piercings Trying to make her look like a rocker DJ person And I have to admit I read that article and I thought long and hard about it And I was like, okay Is this going to be something That we see more and more as these smaller market radio stations struggle or increasingly find it difficult to fill these slots.

43:44I'm wondering, from your vantage point, what do you think? Do you think that this will be a growing trend of people trying to cut costs by automating out radio personalities? I think there's definitely a risk of it. And I don't say that with any, you know, zeal. I think that's not great for radio. It's not great for the industry. It's not great for American culture. But, again, when you think that some of these big conglomerates are driven, you know, to maximize profit, cut costs, and, again, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But if they're able to swap out human beings, you know, this is happening in every industry, right?

44:16It's not just radio. It's can robots, you know, build things at Amazon, right? Or, you know, I use Waymo when I'm out here in L.A. Oh, yeah, it's a crazy experience. It is. I just tried it. It is an interesting experience. So I do think that's a danger, and that's not a great thing, especially because – especially if there's a danger of them mimicking existing talent. In fact, that's one area. The broadcasters and SoundExchange, one area that we agree on, as does most of the industry, there's a bill in Congress being pushed right now called the No Fakes Act to try to minimize or prevent the ability to take someone's name.

45:02image likeness voice and i mean you know really popular djs should are on that list and have an interest as well we share the desire to protect the human creativity ai is a complex issue which we can talk about for another hour i'm sure and you know it's got some interesting things it brings to the industry but the threat it brings of usurping real human creativity is a real one that i think we need to we need to work against everybody needs to work against it and and preserve American culture, American craft, American music. You know, at some point, if all you have is a bunch of machines just regurgitating variations of all the stuff that's already been created, is that really a world we want to be in?

45:41I don't think so. Yeah, yeah. And an interesting story that I just wrote about was iHeartRadio just announced that they have this new program called Guaranteed Human. And basically, they're going to be plugging this on their radio stations and reminding people that this is part of their policy, but basically the policy is that they will not play AI songs, they will not have AI radio personalities, and they will also not allow for any AI podcasts within their network. This is really the first company that I've seen just take a hard no stance against AI. I think there's a lot of music companies right now that are kind of like, if it's responsible, then maybe we could do it.

46:21But iHeart really came out and put a flag in the ground, said what they wanted to say. They say, we're not playing any AI songs. I'm wondering, do you think that that can stand as AI continues to develop and we start to get more and more AI songs? I'm sure some of them will climb the charts. We already are seeing the start of that. Do you think that this is a policy that they can maintain as the future progresses with AI? It's a great question. And I think, and good for them for doing that. Again, we have our differences with iHeart, but we also have many things we agree on. There's this Symbiotic relationship between radio and the industry in some ways, and then in other ways we're like competing cousins.

47:02But I think it could stand. One of the things I think about sometimes is think about consumer decisions that have been made on ostensibly ethical grounds. For instance, no blood diamonds or blood-free diamonds or coffee that comes from a certain area because it's raised more ethically or I don't want my jeans manufactured by children in a faraway country at slave labor rates. Imagine a world where human-only is something a consumer makes an election to do. You know, I don't want AI music. I want human music. And that could be a differentiating factor for some of the products four years from now.

47:46I don't think AI is going to disappear. I mean, AI is here. And I do think there will be AI creations. And as I said, there are very interesting things AI can do. You know, like there's a K-pop band a couple years ago who, you know, dropped on the same day a record in six different languages. Oh, yes. Manat, I believe. Manat, yeah. Midnat? Maybe it's Midnat. I'm sorry. Maybe it's Midnat. I don't know. It's kind of a made-up word, but I think, yeah. You know, that's really cool. So M-I-D-N-A-T-T. Or Randy Travis. You know, Randy Travis, a great friend of the industry, had a stroke 12 years ago, can't sing anymore.

48:19He released his, you know, a new record last year because of AI. So there's some really cool things they can do. But, you know, we've got to make sure that AI doesn't displace the role for human creators. Yeah. I agree. So I posted about this new iHeart plan on Instagram, and I always get a lot of comments whenever I talk about AI on social media. And people were overwhelmingly very excited. I don't know if I just hit a certain corner of the Internet with that post or not, but people seemed really excited by this idea to do the Guaranteed Human program and to certify that all the music that was going to be played on iHeart and all the radio personalities and all the podcasts were going to be Guaranteed Human.

49:02I think the interesting thing for me is Deezer recently released some numbers saying that 97 % of people can't tell the difference between AI music and human-made music. And, I mean, I hope that iHeart's detection tool is really strong and can differentiate if they're trying to enforce this policy. They said that that's how they're going to do it. They're going to screen songs, put it through an AI detection tool that they have. I'm not sure which one, but that will be the way that they determine whether or not something can be played. But the fact that we're already at a place where 97 percent of people can't tell just by listening is crazy to me.

49:43It is crazy. And, you know, you may be right. I mean, I think you are right. And it's only going to get worse, by the way. I mean, yeah, it's better. But back to my, you know, my example, you can't look at a diamond and know did it come from a war region. You can't necessarily look at genes and know where they were they built by, you know, children in horrible factory conditions. So maybe one of the things we need to think about as an industry, and by the way, this isn't just music, is requiring AI companies, requiring people to put AI content to identify it, to label it. You know, maybe if you're pushing AI out and not being clear that it's AI, maybe that should be considered an unfair trade practice or somehow deceptive.

50:22part of what's being talked about in Congress as well are not just the No Fakes Act and the name, image, likeness, voice, but labeling issues, detection issues. Should the AI companies be required to embed in their products something that a sniffer or some other detection mechanism can pick up? I think it's true that they can detect a lot of AI work now. It's an open question about as AI gets better and better, 10 years from now, it's going to be a lot harder to detect what is AI. So I think disclosure, metadata, labeling, being open about what's AI and what's not is something we should think about as an industry.

51:04Yeah. I mean, already I'm starting to talk to some of these AI detection tools, and sometimes I'll send them songs that I'm like, it sounds like AI to me, but also I never want to accuse someone of using AI without fully vetting and making sure. And some of these tools are having a hard time giving me a clear answer. They're like 70 % sure that this is AI. I'm like, well, that's not good enough. I can't just go on that. And what does AI mean? I mean, if you talk to – Well, yeah, that too. When you go to South By and you talk to the brand-new artist up and coming, to them, AI is just another tool.

51:35It's no different than any other tool they use. And I think even the industry and certain U.S. copyright law, like if you use some AI to help create something, but at the end of the day, it's kind of a human-made product. That's a very different thing than something that's spit out of a machine based on nothing but code with no human input. So even when we talk about AI music, where's that line? Where does the human-created thing become an AI thing that we would consider not human? That line is yet to be drawn. Yeah. So I'm wondering with SoundExchange, I imagine there's not too many cases where an quote-unquote AI artist or an AI song would be generating a ton of royalties with SoundExchange quite yet.

52:18But do you guys have any policy about a song that you know is 100 % generated by an AI model? Are you still paying out on those songs? So great question. First of all, we don't get a ton of them because if you think about it, if you're a streaming service that has to pay royalties to SoundExchange or anybody else, And if you had – and you're in the US and it is a 100 percent generative AI creation, under US law, that's not copyrightable. You can't copyright. And if it's not copyrightable, then it probably doesn't need to have a royalty. And if it doesn't need to have a royalty, why would they report it to us?

52:52So if they're able to scrape it out and decrease their royalty load, in fact, that's a dirty little danger I worry about as well. Are a lot of the big platforms who we all know the names of going to sort of slowly start slipping in AI stuff so they decrease their royalty load by 1%, 2 %? But if we have something that has come in that we expect is generative AI created, either due to the metadata or sometimes there's press on it. There's some very famous AI creations. We will not pay out on it. We basically – and it's not – it's a minimal amount of money, but we basically hold that money and we will wait.

53:37If someday this thing that we think is generative AI turns out is ruled by the Copyright Office to have enough human input to be copyrightable, then we'll pay out on it. But for now, if we suspect it's fully generative AI and if – in which case it doesn't merit a royalty, we won't pay out on it. Got it. But we're not making a decision of whether it's copyrightable or not. We'll let the Copyright Office do that. Yeah, I think that's smart to hold on to the money and just wait and see. Everything is still so new and things are developing so fast. And there's all these lawsuits related to it that are going to take many years to flesh out.

54:10And as I said, it's not a material amount of money. So it's not a huge issue for our business. But it could be for others. Especially, as I said, some of the bigger streaming services that we all have on our phone. And, you know, imagine if they could shave off just a few points from their royalty costs. It could happen. It could. To end off our conversation, I wanted to make sure that we touched on the American Music Fairness Act. This is something that you've been working on for a while now. So can you tell us about what the American Music Fairness Act is? Sure. The American – coming full circle.

54:45Yes. As a good storyteller that you are. I try. We started off talking about, you know, terrestrial radio not paying. AMFA is a bill supported by SoundExchange and the Whole Music First Coalition to basically try to get FM radio to pay for the sound recordings the same way every other platform and the same way every other country does. It's a basic fairness issue. Radio makes$14 billion a year off the recordings that drive their business, and they share none of it with the artists. So it is simply an effort to make FM be treated like all the other platforms out there. And, you know, and one thing I want to definitely say about it is, you know, we take precautions to protect local radio.

55:32It actually helps local and small radio. You know, if you're a smaller radio station, that's not part of a big, huge conglomerate. So if you're truly a small mom and pop or someone who owns, you know, just a handful of stations, you can basically get a royalty for$500 a year, all the music you can pay. And if you're certain nonprofits or educational, that can go down to$100 or even in some cases$10. So this bill is about the big commercial radio stations making the bulk of the money off the artist's back and the labels back. Local radio is protected and certain educational radio is protected. And it would help them because now they would have this protection in federal law.

56:14Interesting. Yeah, I mean, you kind of anticipated what my follow-up question was going to be, which is, you know, is this going to damage local radio further than it already has? But it sounds like you all have some rules built into that. We do. And, you know, indeed, I mean, what you see happening out there is the local radio that is struggling, they are prime candidates to be plucked off by the big, you know, behemoths. So the big radio conglomerates are getting bigger as these smaller radio stations struggle more and more. So this bill, yes, it does say there's a royalty, but I think$500 for – if you're a radio station making$1.5 million and you can pay$500 for your primary input, that's a very fair deal to strike.

57:03And we're getting more and more momentum on this bill. Earlier this year, 300 A-list artists put a letter out to Congress. There's actually a hearing next week in the Senate on the bill. Gene Simmons of Kiss fame will be testifying. Huge. Will he be on full makeup or no? I suspect not, but I haven't actually asked that question. But he's a great spokesperson and a perfect example of what this is all about because, yes, Gene Simmons is obviously very successful. But you'll hear, I think, next week. He certainly has said this to us. He's very passionate about this issue, and it's not about him. It's about his kids.

57:44He has a couple of kids who are in the music industry, and he looks at what's facing them, the challenges facing them. And if they have the type of exposure that he had – I mean think of all the radio play that Kiss got in this country. And Gene Simmons and his bandmates made little to nothing as artists, right? So for him and for a lot of the artists we talk to, it's not about them and their personal situation or their personal revenue. It's really about setting up the industry for the up-and-coming talent, the up-and-coming artists because it's hard. It's always been hard to be an artist. It's long days on the road, long drives in a van, in the early days crashing on friends' couches.

58:27It's always been hard to be an artist. And in some ways, it's harder now than ever. There are some things that make it easier. There are more platforms you can be on. There's more DIY products that can help you get your stuff out. But to really break through and to make it a career where you don't have to do a side gig, it's harder than ever. And it's all the more reason why one of the oldest distribution platforms in our country should no longer get away with making$14 billion and paying absolutely zero to the people who make the music. Well, this has been super interesting. Before I let you go, I do want to do what I do with all my guests here on the record.

59:08I ask everyone to make me a playlist of three songs based on three prompts. So three songs playlist. Okay. Yeah. Rapid shot. Okay. All right. I got a drink for this. The drink of water. Okay. So the first prompt is a song that you can no longer gatekeep. So a lesser known song. What's your pick? You know what I discovered recently that I really like? It's by a band called Vultpeck. V-U-L-P-E-C-K. They're like a sort of a funk soul band out of Michigan. There's a great song called Animal Spirits. I love the song. I love funk. It's one of my favorite genres, if we're going to talk about genres. But it's got a lot of keyboards.

59:49It's got a lot of vocals. It's got a really powerful bridge. Love the bridge that really sort of builds and then comes down like a hammer. So check it out. Do you know Volpeck? I do. I've heard that their concerts are incredible. They've got to be. Yeah. So it's a recent discovery of mine. And I mean, they're a great band, but that's one that, you know, I'm new to. Love it. Okay. A favorite throwback? Favorite throwback. That's easy. I used to play keyboards. I don't have chops anymore, so don't ask for a sample. So I've always been a big Billy Joel fan. And I would say Vienna by Billy Joel. Classic.

1:00:23Stranger album. That was my senior quote in high school. Wow. I love it. There's some great quotes in that song. Billy Joel's an amazing artist. He is. and what is a guilty pleasure for you? It's really risky for someone to say what a guilty pleasure actually is. It's not one song. It's basically the soundtrack to Pitch Perfect. Oh, that's a perfect pick. I love it. The cup song. The cup song. You know, I mean, great songs, acapella, great harmony. I'm a sucker for harmony. Wait, so are you an acapella? Did you watch Glee? How deep into acapella are you? I did not watch Glee. I was never part of an acapella group.

1:01:02I thought about trying to join. I went to UVA and they had the Hullabahoos, I think, was the acapella group in Virginia. I never did that. But Pitch Perfect is a pretty good movie. Sorry for calling it a guilty pleasure, but it is. No, I think that's a perfect pick. Well, Mike, thank you so much for coming to On the Record. This has been so much fun. This has been a blast. Thank you for having me. I look forward to our next installment. Amazing. Another special thank you to Mike Happy for coming on the show and talking to us about the evolution of radio. Up next, we're going to be diving into our charts roundup, where we'll highlight this week's biggest movers and shakers.

1:01:39Here is the top 10 of the Hot 100 chart dated December 13th. Coming in at number 10, it's It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year by Andy Williams. The Christmas song Merry Christmas to You by Nat King Cole comes in at 9. Eight this week is Santa Tell Me by Ariana Grande. Ordinary by Alex Warren falls to number seven. The Fate of Ophelia by Taylor Swift falls to six. Golden by Huntrix falls to five.

1:02:17Jingle Bell Rock by Bobby Helms comes in at four. number three this week is rocking around the christmas tree by brenda lee number two is last christmas by wham and finally number one on the billboard hot 100 chart for the week of december 13th it's all i want for christmas is you by mariah carey for its 19th week at number one thanks for listening to this week's episode of on the record and another special thank you to my guest, Mike Huppie, for coming on the show. If you liked our episode today, please consider hitting us with a rating or a follow or a thumbs up or all of those good things. They really help our show to grow and to reach new audiences.

1:03:03Again, I'm your host, Kristen Robinson, and tune in next week for another peek behind the curtain of the music business. I'll see you then.

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