April 6, 2023 • 34 mins
Allen Grubman is a legend in the music business, but he’s not a musician. He’s an entertainment lawyer who for over 50 years has been making deals for superstars in music and media. He’s a trusted advisor to Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and, of course, Bob Pittman. Bob sat down with his longtime friend and confidante to learn how he went from Brooklyn kid to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee. All it took was a stint singing on NBC’s Children’s Hour, an infectious personality, and a keen attention to the business of music.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
I am always open to new ideas, open to new people,
open to new clients, because that's where the future is.
The future isn't where people are frozen in a position
(00:21):
or in a place. It's thinking about what is the
next step. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to this
episode of Math and Magic. Today, we're going to explore
the insider's view of deals and strategy and business, especially
the entertainment and media business. Our guest today has seen
it all. It's been in the middle of it all,
(00:42):
and has even been inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame. He's a true insider, it's deal maker
extraordinaire and, as some call him, super lawyer Alan Grugman
Alan is Brooklyn born Brooklyn Law School, and still wears
it all as his identity. He represents Bruce Springsteen, Elton,
John Madonna, YouTube, Lady Gaga, John mellycamping on and on.
(01:04):
As a child, he's sang show tunes on an NBC
Children's hour every week, that is, until his voice changed,
and as an adult, he still has the comfort of
being a performer and knows how to engage his audience.
He's on the inside as a friend and trusted advisor
to legends like David Geffen, as well as executives and artists.
(01:25):
He represents he is the guy who was in the
room and really knows what happened. He's been my close
friend and advisor for over forty years. He was instrumental
in building him TV in the early days, and he
continued his relationship there long after I left, and he's
even been key to us as we've built iHeartMedia. But
most of all, he's a great human who cares deeply
(01:47):
about others. Alan welcome. Thank you very very much for
that introduction. Before we get started. We have a thing
we do on math and Magic. Called you in sixty seconds.
You're ready shoot. Do you prefer cats or dogs? Dogs
early riser or night owl? Very early riser? East Coast
or West Coast? East Coast for sure? Frank Sinatra or
(02:10):
Bruce Springsteen. I think Bruce won't be too pissed off.
Frank Sinatra, HMTV or iHeartRadio, iHeartRadio AM or FM FM,
The Beatles or the Rolling Stones, Beatles call or text
call without a doubt, it's about to get Harder, favorite
(02:30):
era of music, the American Songbook. Favorite TV show Curb
Your Enthusiasm, favorite radio station, Seriously Sinatra, favorite movie The Godfather, movies,
favorite actor Robert de Niro. Favorite city New York. Then
right behind New York is Paris and London. You got
(02:52):
a quote to live by. If you do right by people,
they'll end up doing right by you. What did you
want to be when you were growing up? I wanted
to be in the entertainment business. And when I realized
that I had no talent, the second best thing was
to be an entertainment lawyer. That doesn't involve that much talent. Okay,
(03:14):
let's start with the music business. The music business has
made many transitions. To forty five to the LP cassette
tapes CDs was a big move, But the biggest and
most disruptive of my life was to transition to digital downloads,
which also moved from consumers buying one track instead of
entire album. Many experts thought the industry would not survive it,
(03:36):
and indeed Limblevotnik bought Warner Music for what at the
moment seemed like a high price. Today, in retrospect, seems
like the deal of the century, streaming subscription services were
placed downloads and the industry rebounded, And today Universal, Sony
and Warner are healthier and more valuable than they've ever been,
and the indies are too. So here's the question, what's
(03:58):
the next issue lurking out there that the music industry
will have to contend with? What's hanging over them? Well,
that's the sixty four dollar question. What they're doing now
is reaping the benefits of streaming, which delights them beyond belief.
In other words, they might be thinking of what comes
(04:19):
after streaming, but right now they are basking in the
sun of streaming. Warner Music was worth five billion dollars
four billion dollars three billion dollars what he bought it,
and now it's worth seventeen UMG. At one point before
streaming was worth five billion. I think now it's training
(04:40):
at in the thirties, and the same thing Persny. What
has dramatically changed is the distribution of music turned these
companies into gold mines. And not necessarily because the talent
has increased dramatically, but the way you distribute the talent
(05:02):
has increased dramatically. So I don't think they're trying to
figure out what the next move is. I think they're
focusing on how to expand as much as possible their
ability to generate money from streaming. But if you ask
them what comes after streaming, I think that also applies
for a Netflix and Disney. Plus I think it's the
(05:25):
same issue, what comes after streaming. I don't think anybody
has an answer, but they're not concerned about having an
answer because they have minting money with the streaming approach,
especially the music companies. In media and television, et cetera
is a little different, but in the music business, the
streaming has turned into a proverb your gold mine. In
(05:48):
our lifetime, Alan, you and I saw the transition from
albums to CDs. We saw that terrible transition from CDs
to stream its song by song on Apple, and then
we've seen the transition to subscription, which has actually made
the industry healthy again. As you point out any big
lessons from these past dislocations and transitions, yes, you cannot
(06:12):
be afraid of transition. Remember Napster, which was the early
form of what we're talking about. The record companies was
so frightened that they literally killed Napster. I was representing Napster.
I was trying to work out arrangements with the three
companies or four companies, whatever was, and they were so frightened,
(06:34):
and what they were frightened of actually turned out to
be the greatest thing that have happened to them. So
I think that if people don't view progress and new
opportunities with open arms, that make you a huge mistake.
And every time companies are afraid of the future, they
(06:54):
usually die. And when the CD came out, and I
remember I was at Warner Communications was running MTV at
the time. Somebody brought out the CD player. He was
from Japan. They have to have a little transformer so
we could play it in the US, and they put
the CD on. The lawyers said, oh my god, that's
a master quality recording. We have to stop the CD.
(07:18):
And Warner I remember it was Bob Krauss now and
a few guys said, what are you crazy. This is
this is the future. We've got to get aboard. And
they won. And when the downloads came and digital came
and Napster came, it was the same argument, except this
time the lawyers said we have to stop it. In
the lawyers one, people are afraid of the unknown, that's
(07:41):
always been the case, not only in our industry but
in life. But the CD when it finally became popular,
every person who had an LP album had to go
buy the same album in a CD. And during the
eighties the record business laurished because of CDs. It's very
(08:03):
similar to what happened with streaming. It's generating ten times
more buddy than it did when people were buying individual
tracks or whatever you want to call it. So what
I've learned in life is I am always open to
new ideas, open to new people, open to new clients,
because that's where the future is. The future isn't where
(08:25):
people are frozen in a position or in a place.
It's thinking about what is the next step. Let's go
back on the CDs a little bit. Do you think
we would have made the transition to digital finally if
it had not been for Steve Jobs. It's a very
good question, I would say that. But Steve Jobs did
(08:48):
that interim step allowed streaming to come along and be accepted.
If there was no Steve Jobs and he didn't create
what he created, I think it would have been much
more difficult for the record companies to accept streaming. And
do you think the record business, the music business would
still be in the dulg rum because if not for
(09:09):
the subscription services like Spotify, Apple and Amazon, oh yeah,
they'd be slepping along. Oh yeah, it would be entirely different.
I mean, I can't even perceive of where the record
business would be today without streaming. You had a long
history and have had a long history of representing artists,
and many credit you personally for finally getting artists the
(09:30):
money they deserve, yet not undermining the music companies to
help them get that revenue. When did that change began
and was there a particular deal that was the tipping point?
Over time, as I developed more of a reputation, I
had credibility. I was representing so many artists that the
(09:52):
record companies had to listen to what I said and
had to concede to some of the important points that
I want, which was creative control more than they had before,
and financial control in other words, making much better financial deals,
and also the ownership of masters that came along as
(10:13):
I developed more credibility and I became more powerful as
an entity, so that when I was dealing with a
record company and they knew that they weren't dealing with
me with one artist, but they were dealing with me
with twenty artists. I was able to accomplish war. And
I always remembered one of my first clients, who should
be nameless, had an artist on his label, and the
(10:37):
guy had a huge hit, and I said, well, Jesus,
you must owe this guy a fortune. No, no, no,
you know what I did. I rented him a Cadillac
or I bought him. In other words, artists just weren't
getting paid. They were just getting screwed, and it was terrible.
So as time went by, and I recognized this as
(11:00):
well as many other people, but thank god, I eventually
created enough power to be able to change it. Now
artists are paid beyond properly. The companies that are in
the music business, all major public companies, and artists are
now getting their due. They're getting their due in the
areas I just described financially creatively and certain owned their masters.
(11:25):
And I'm very proud of that because I think that
if there's one contribution I've made to the record industry
was what I was able to accomplish for artists. So
let me give you a tip of the hat here.
You weren't always Alan Grugman. When I met you're back
in nineteen eighty you were the guy on the rise,
(11:46):
but not yet the biggest in the business, But in
my mind you were the smartest. Probably not many people
know this story, but MTV was in danger of being
shut down in the first few years. My boss was
fired about a year after MTV launched. By the way,
because of that, I got to move from the creative
side running the product to really building the company as
(12:07):
the COO. But it's interesting to me that when I
sort of hit that and I went from being you
got to make a successful product, which we did, and
then my next challenge was we got to figure out
how to make money. Because the other folks here have
not been successful that they're gone, it's you're on your back.
I reached out to you, and you were not just
a lawyer for us. You were a full partner in
(12:29):
developing the business strategy and operating plan. You made that
jump from being the lawyer to being the business strategist
who as a consultant and trusted advisor to many businesses
and executives. How did you make the jump? I always
believed that to be a great lawyer you have to
(12:51):
be a great businessman. So as soon as I started
practicing law and obtaining clients, I would always be interested
did in the reasoning that they had for their business decisions.
I was never the kind of lawyer that could sit
down and draft contracts or could come up with the
legal arguments. What I had was an enormous amount of
(13:16):
common sense and an understanding of the law and an
understanding of business. So as time went by and I
built the law firm and it got bigger and bigger,
my responsibilities for doing the legal work became less. And
this great group of lawyers we have here, they took
care of the law and I focused on advising clients,
(13:38):
coming up with ideas and negotiating very interesting, lucrative, non
traditional deals for them. But I always considered myself more
of a businessman than a traditional lawyer, and it worked
out fine. I always said, I'm a businessman first and
a lawyer second. So how did having that bigger pick
(14:00):
your view and that higher level access in a company
helped the artist you represented? Oh? In my opinion, life
is all about relationships. The greater the relationships you have
with people, the more positive relationships you have with people,
the more they're going to do for you. So when
(14:23):
I would sit down and negotiate a contract with a
superstar and I'm dealing with the CEO of the company,
who I have a professional relationship with, a personal relationship, etc.
I will do better for my client, the artist, because
of my relationship with the person I'm dealing with. Then
(14:45):
if I didn't have a relationship, take your two hands
and put one finger six inches or twelve inches away
from the other finger. In every negotiation, the finger on
the left is the minimum that you will get, no
matter what your relationship was. That's the minimum you're going
to get. And the right finger is the maximum you're
(15:06):
going to get, no matter if the guy's your brother lawyer,
he's not going to give you more than that. But
if you have great relationships, you will get closer to
the right finger than you will to the left finger
because there's a good feeling there, and especially if I'm
representing people who are worthy of it. But I've seen
(15:27):
artists get terrible deals because their representatives had terrible relationships
with the companies. So relationships is critically important in being
successful in any industry, especially the entertainment industry. So talk
about how you know you've done a good deal. Well,
you know something, I really believe that the best deals
(15:50):
ever made are the deals where both parties walk away
not one hundred percent happy. So, in other words, if
I'm representing a client and I know I've done a
really good deal, I know that I didn't take the
last cent I can get from the person I'm negotiating with.
(16:10):
Because when you make a deal, when one person thinks
that they killed it and the other person thinks that
they get screwed, the person that got screwed is waiting
for the moment to get even. Well, you know, if
Steve Ross had that same philosophy, don't destroy people in
the process because you've got to be in business with them.
(16:31):
What is that great mafia line. You don't wound your enemies,
you kill them. The idea here is if you negotiate
and you end up wounding a person, he's going to
come back and try to kill you. You know. And
what I've been told my whole career is that my
talent is everybody walks away feeling okay, and I've made
(16:56):
phenomenal deals for my clients. And by the way, the
other side, at the end of the day, will say,
you know, Alan got all this from us, but you
know what, we feel okay about it for whatever reasons,
and that's been a tremendous asset to me. So again,
you don't want to make killer deals. You want to
make phenomenal deals, but you don't want to go over
(17:18):
the edge. You know, you're famous for keeping negotiations friendly
and often funny. It's not just your personality or is
that your strategy. Both you can get more done with
a great laugh than you can with a great line.
Mora on math and magic right after this quick break,
(17:41):
welcome back to math and Magic. Let's hear more from
my conversation with Alan Grugman. I want to go back
in time to young Allan. You're a Capricorn, which is
a strong business sign. You were born in nineteen forty two.
You grew up in Brooklyn in the nineteen forties and fifties,
and can you paint us a picture of Brooklyn in
(18:02):
those days and how you grew up Well, okay, I
grew up in Brooklyn, middle class Jewish family. My mother
and father, they were married to the day they died
at the age of eleven. My mother decided she was
a stage mother. For some reason she heard me sing.
She'd say, I would sing myself to sleep. Who the
heck knows, but she ends up getting me an audition
(18:25):
in the television show on NBC. It was called One
or odd a Children's Hour, and it was basically a
group of very talented kids who every Sunday for an hour.
We were on NBC and living in Brooklyn. The only
time you ever were in a limousine was at a funeral.
(18:48):
In other words, as part of the package deal at
the funeral home, you got the front car, which we
know was in there, and then the car right behind
it was a limousine for the family. When I was
on the Children's Hour, every Saturday morning, we would rehearse
at thirty. Rockefeller said that they picked me up in
a limousine and they would take me to rehearsal, and
(19:13):
then after rehearsal, they would take us out to like
great restaurants. Growing up in Brooklyn, the only two restaurants
I ever went to was a Delhi and Chinese Food
on Sunday. So I was on that show for two
years and then my voice changed. That was the end
of it, but it made an enormous impression on me
the entertainment. I said, this is really good, this is fun.
(19:35):
So now I'm still living in Brooklyn. I end up
going to high school, I end up going to college,
and then when I went to Brooklyn Law School, I said,
you know, I remember that everybody in the entertainment business,
you know, going to good restaurants, having fun. And that's
when I decided that I wanted to become an entertainment lawyer.
So growing up in Brooklyn, I grew up in a
(19:57):
very middle class neighborhood. I had a very good family life,
and that exposure to the entertainment business is what motivated
me to after law school, I said, I want to
be an entertainment lawyer. And by the way, some of
the most successful people in show business live in Brooklyn. Obviously,
(20:17):
my dear friend Geffen Lis of Brooklyn, strides in Neil Diamond.
It goes on and on and on. So for some reason,
Brooklyn was this breeding ground for people who end up
in the entertainment industry. Tell me about school. Good student,
not a good student, interested student, have a lot of friends.
To paint the picture a little bit okay. In school,
(20:38):
I was an average athlete and at best an average student.
I was not overly popular. I wasn't like an outcast.
I was a normal, average kid in high school, and
same thing in college. I belonged to a fraternity, but
of course not the best fraternity. And I was always
(21:02):
a very weak student academically. I don't know what the
reason is, you know, maybe I wasn't interested or whatever.
And then I go to Brooklyn Law School. And in
Brooklyn Law School they encouraged you to take a job
after school working for a lawyer in downtown Brooklyn. So
(21:22):
I wanted to be an entertainment lawyer. So my first
year in law school, I got a job at the
William Morris Agency from four to eight at night, like
after school. This is interesting. The second and third year
I was a page at CBS. I would walk into
class every day with a great sports jacket and a
CBS I and everybody would say, what's wrong with Grupping?
(21:46):
Is he crazy? What is he doing showing people to
their seats? What's wrong with them? You know what they
found out about ten years later that there was nothing
wrong with me. If you get my drift, so I'll
put it to you this way. I didn't graduate at
the top of my class, and I'm being very facetious.
(22:07):
And that's why when I graduated and I found a
job working for a lawyer, I couldn't get a job
in a big law firm because I didn't have the grades.
So I started working for a man by the name
of WALTA. Hoefer, who at one time represented the Beatles
in the early sixties. But that's the progression of my
life up until the time I started my own practice
(22:29):
in seventy four. Basically that was it, and I was
very lucky. You know, I'm a big believer that luck
is seventy five percent of the game and brains is
twenty five percent. If you don't get that seventy five
percent of luck, the twenty five percent of brains is useless.
(22:50):
One time, Elton John said to me, Alan, there are
a thousand Elton Johns in this world, but I was
the one that got that great opportunity, and that his
luck is being in the right place at the right time.
And I've been very, very lucky, beyond lucky. So you
start your firm in the mid seventies. By the late seventies,
(23:11):
the legendary Walter yet Nikof was at its peak of
power and not yet at his peak of craziness head
of CBS Records, You were one of the few people
who he would listen to in respect. What did you
learn from Walter? What made him great in spite of
his problems. He told me a great expression, it's not
(23:33):
about the money. It's about the money. Now what do
I mean by that? Walt yet Nikov was a lawyer.
He went to Columbia, he practiced law, and then he
ended up being CEO of CBS Records. He didn't understand music.
It isn't like he was looking for talent like Clive Davis.
(23:53):
But you know what, as soon as there was somebody
that became very successful, he bring him into the and
he'd say, boys, let's renegotiate your contract. And he would
renegotiate the contract and give him tons of money, and
then they would love him. That's what I realized that
a very important part of everybody's career is not only
(24:16):
the creative, it's also the monetary. The music business is
made up of music and business. That's when I realized
how critically important the business side of the music businesses,
and the people who know how to handle that side
of the business are the ones that do very very well.
That's what I learned from him. I learned that you
(24:37):
take care of people because if they as I said before,
if you take care of them, they're going to take
care of you. And all these artists loved him, whether
it was Michael Jackson, whether it was Spreaks before he
went crazy, Billy Joel, they all loved him. You know why.
He made sure that they made a lot of money.
(24:59):
So at a certain point you realized you had skills
and relationships beyond music, and you could provide services beyond
negotiating just entertainment deals. When did you have that epiphany?
What started it for you? In two thousand? In late nineties,
I saw that the music business was going through a
very strange period. There was all kinds of the stealing
(25:23):
of music, and I said, I better expand my horizons.
And I started hiring a couple of lawyers who knew
movies and television, etc. Etc. And I did that as
a defense mechanism because I thought maybe the music practice
would be dramatically hurt if all of a sudden the
way it used to function will no longer function. And
(25:44):
then I started bringing him some guys. I hired some
people that knew these other areas, and today I would
say music is probably the most fifty percent of the practice.
So it's one of the few times I had great
foresight that was a big transition for you. No one,
by the way, had ever done that in the music
business on that side of it. What's the business lesson
(26:07):
here in that transformation of your firm. The business lesson is,
it's just like if you're a lawyer and you have
one client and you're dependent upon that client, that puts
you in a very weak position. You will always be
much stronger if you have ten clients then if you
have one or two. The same thing here. I was
(26:29):
nervous that the music business was going to go through
a terrible period, and I said, oh my god, if
that happens, I don't have anything to fall back on.
So by developing clients in all different areas, whether it's movies, television, sports, journalism, theater,
(26:50):
if one area is soft, it gets picked up by
the other areas. So I came to realize how important
it was to diverse fy legally, and I was right
because the fact that I wasn't just a music law
firm anymore. But we did other things just gave us
more prestige, more credibility, and eventually became much more lucrative.
(27:16):
And today, you know, we represent all kind of We
represent CEOs, we represent media companies, represent record companies, represent
Iought Radio Live. It goes on and on, and that
is because we diversify. You were one of the early
founders right in the beginning when I'm in Rnigan and
Jan Winner put together the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
(27:39):
This year, you were the first music attorney to ever
be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
for your contributions to the business and obviously to the artist.
That's heavy stuff for a guy who was singing on
a children's show on NBC from Brooklyn. Give us just
a couple of minutes of how that felt. You know,
it's interesting. One of my dearest friends is a guy
(28:02):
by the name of David Geffen that some of your
audience might know, some might not. He's an enormously successful guy,
grew up in Brooklyn, not far from where I grew up,
And we've had the following conversation. Could we have ever
imagined when we were growing up that we would be
in the position we're in now it was incomprehensible because
(28:27):
when we were growing up, if you were rich, you
lived in Great Neck or you lived in Scarsdale. It
was a whole different level of success and wealth. So
what I think about my life now, I couldn't have perceived.
I mean, I've but just been so lucky. I couldn't
perceive that I would ever be able to live the
(28:49):
life I lived now. And it's as simple as that.
Let's get some advice from you. If someone's starting in
the music business today, what would you tell him in
what area. Let's say they're going to start on the
business side of the music business today, you know what
I would say to them. If let's say we're talking
about lawyers hypothetically, I would say, if you can work
(29:11):
for a large firm, you should do that for a
few years because they will train you to be a
great lawyer, and then you'll come to me. In terms
of business, I am a big believer in entrepreneurship. To
become a successful entrepreneur as extraordinarily unusual. But if you succeed,
the world is open to you. There are two kinds
(29:32):
of people. There are people who were destined to be
employees and executives, and then there were people that were
destined to be entrepreneurs. You basically have always had the
mentality of an entrepreneur, even though you ran companies, but
you always thought like an entrepreneur. So let's go to
some more advice. How about someone who's renegotiating their employment contract. Well,
(29:57):
first of all, it depends on what they lever and
if they have leverage, I would tell them to be
very aggressive, because you know, it's the old story. I
always say to people, if I ask for the absurd,
I end up getting the semi absurd, whereas if you
ask for the reasonable, you end up with less than reasonable.
(30:20):
So if somebody is renegotiating their contract and they're doing
a great job, don't be afraid to ask, because my
grandmother used to say, if you don't ask, you don't get. So,
if you could go back in time and give some
advice to your twenty one year old self, what would
(30:40):
that advice be. I would have said, follow your love
and your passion, which is what I did, and be
as pleasantly aggressive as you can be. You shouldn't be
obnoxiously aggressive, but when people see that you are ambitious
and you're aggressive, in the right way, you will get
(31:04):
much farther than if you play it safe. So we
normally end every episode of Math and Magic with a
shout out to the greats of math and magic and business.
But given who you are and in your eighty years,
the people you've encountered, can you give us the three
or four people you've encountered who you stick in your
(31:26):
mind as the legends the greats? Well, I would probably
have to say Steve Ross was this brilliant, brilliant man
who created Warner Brothers. I would say him. I had
the opportunity to meet Bill Paley, who was a phenomenal
and creative businessman. And let's tell people who Bill Paley
(31:48):
was started CBS. And although people don't know who's Bill
Paley is today, which shocks me. Bill Paley in the
sixties seventies could not have been more powerful, you know
he found at CBS. In the record business, he was
very controversial. But Ahmed Ertigan was a true legend. David
Geffin obviously was a great inspiration to me, and I'll
(32:11):
tell you that story. I met David Geffin in nineteen
eighty one when I was making a deal with him
with Hall and Oates, and we hit it off immediately
and we became very very good friends over the years,
and he has been a tremendous booster of mine. But
you know, David Geffin is an example of a true entrepreneur.
(32:34):
And he never built CBS or he never built the
General Motors, but as an entrepreneur he was always phenomenally successful,
first as a manager, then as a record executive, and
then an owner of dream Work. He was always very,
very successful, and he was always been very important in
(32:54):
my life. Alan, you are a unique human being and
so much touch so many people, me included. Thanks for
being with us today and thanks for all you've done
my pleasure, Bob, and thank you for inviting me. Here
are a few things I picked up in my conversation
with Alan. One, embrace the future. When the music industry
(33:18):
jumped from records to CDs to streaming, Alan was always
on the side of the future. Work with progress, not
against it. New developments will keep your business thriving. Two.
Don't wound your enemies and negotiations. Don't ring your opponent
drial that will just leave them feeling vengeful. A successful
(33:38):
deal is one that's fair on both ends and leaves
each side feeling pretty good about what they got. Three
Build relationships. Alan's the first to admit that he didn't
get to where he is by being top of his class.
It's his personality and ability to form relationships that built
a strong reputation. Forming and maintaining friendship, so colleagues can
(34:01):
only help you in the long run. It's easier to
make a good deal when you know the person sitting
across the table. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's
it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to
(34:22):
Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio. The show is
hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sidney Rosenbloom for
booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat.
Our editor Emily Maronoff, our engineer Jessica Kranchich, Our executive
producers Nikki Etre and Ali Perry, and of course Gail Raoul,
Eric Angel Noel and everyone who helped bring this show
(34:45):
to your ears. Until next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
I am always open to new ideas, open to new people,
open to new clients, because that's where the future is.
The future isn't where people are frozen in a position
(00:21):
or in a place. It's thinking about what is the
next step. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to this
episode of Math and Magic. Today, we're going to explore
the insider's view of deals and strategy and business, especially
the entertainment and media business. Our guest today has seen
it all. It's been in the middle of it all,
(00:42):
and has even been inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame. He's a true insider, it's deal maker
extraordinaire and, as some call him, super lawyer Alan Grugman
Alan is Brooklyn born Brooklyn Law School, and still wears
it all as his identity. He represents Bruce Springsteen, Elton,
John Madonna, YouTube, Lady Gaga, John mellycamping on and on.
(01:04):
As a child, he's sang show tunes on an NBC
Children's hour every week, that is, until his voice changed,
and as an adult, he still has the comfort of
being a performer and knows how to engage his audience.
He's on the inside as a friend and trusted advisor
to legends like David Geffen, as well as executives and artists.
(01:25):
He represents he is the guy who was in the
room and really knows what happened. He's been my close
friend and advisor for over forty years. He was instrumental
in building him TV in the early days, and he
continued his relationship there long after I left, and he's
even been key to us as we've built iHeartMedia. But
most of all, he's a great human who cares deeply
(01:47):
about others. Alan welcome. Thank you very very much for
that introduction. Before we get started. We have a thing
we do on math and Magic. Called you in sixty seconds.
You're ready shoot. Do you prefer cats or dogs? Dogs
early riser or night owl? Very early riser? East Coast
or West Coast? East Coast for sure? Frank Sinatra or
(02:10):
Bruce Springsteen. I think Bruce won't be too pissed off.
Frank Sinatra, HMTV or iHeartRadio, iHeartRadio AM or FM FM,
The Beatles or the Rolling Stones, Beatles call or text
call without a doubt, it's about to get Harder, favorite
(02:30):
era of music, the American Songbook. Favorite TV show Curb
Your Enthusiasm, favorite radio station, Seriously Sinatra, favorite movie The Godfather, movies,
favorite actor Robert de Niro. Favorite city New York. Then
right behind New York is Paris and London. You got
(02:52):
a quote to live by. If you do right by people,
they'll end up doing right by you. What did you
want to be when you were growing up? I wanted
to be in the entertainment business. And when I realized
that I had no talent, the second best thing was
to be an entertainment lawyer. That doesn't involve that much talent. Okay,
(03:14):
let's start with the music business. The music business has
made many transitions. To forty five to the LP cassette
tapes CDs was a big move, But the biggest and
most disruptive of my life was to transition to digital downloads,
which also moved from consumers buying one track instead of
entire album. Many experts thought the industry would not survive it,
(03:36):
and indeed Limblevotnik bought Warner Music for what at the
moment seemed like a high price. Today, in retrospect, seems
like the deal of the century, streaming subscription services were
placed downloads and the industry rebounded, And today Universal, Sony
and Warner are healthier and more valuable than they've ever been,
and the indies are too. So here's the question, what's
(03:58):
the next issue lurking out there that the music industry
will have to contend with? What's hanging over them? Well,
that's the sixty four dollar question. What they're doing now
is reaping the benefits of streaming, which delights them beyond belief.
In other words, they might be thinking of what comes
(04:19):
after streaming, but right now they are basking in the
sun of streaming. Warner Music was worth five billion dollars
four billion dollars three billion dollars what he bought it,
and now it's worth seventeen UMG. At one point before
streaming was worth five billion. I think now it's training
(04:40):
at in the thirties, and the same thing Persny. What
has dramatically changed is the distribution of music turned these
companies into gold mines. And not necessarily because the talent
has increased dramatically, but the way you distribute the talent
(05:02):
has increased dramatically. So I don't think they're trying to
figure out what the next move is. I think they're
focusing on how to expand as much as possible their
ability to generate money from streaming. But if you ask
them what comes after streaming, I think that also applies
for a Netflix and Disney. Plus I think it's the
(05:25):
same issue, what comes after streaming. I don't think anybody
has an answer, but they're not concerned about having an
answer because they have minting money with the streaming approach,
especially the music companies. In media and television, et cetera
is a little different, but in the music business, the
streaming has turned into a proverb your gold mine. In
(05:48):
our lifetime, Alan, you and I saw the transition from
albums to CDs. We saw that terrible transition from CDs
to stream its song by song on Apple, and then
we've seen the transition to subscription, which has actually made
the industry healthy again. As you point out any big
lessons from these past dislocations and transitions, yes, you cannot
(06:12):
be afraid of transition. Remember Napster, which was the early
form of what we're talking about. The record companies was
so frightened that they literally killed Napster. I was representing Napster.
I was trying to work out arrangements with the three
companies or four companies, whatever was, and they were so frightened,
(06:34):
and what they were frightened of actually turned out to
be the greatest thing that have happened to them. So
I think that if people don't view progress and new
opportunities with open arms, that make you a huge mistake.
And every time companies are afraid of the future, they
(06:54):
usually die. And when the CD came out, and I
remember I was at Warner Communications was running MTV at
the time. Somebody brought out the CD player. He was
from Japan. They have to have a little transformer so
we could play it in the US, and they put
the CD on. The lawyers said, oh my god, that's
a master quality recording. We have to stop the CD.
(07:18):
And Warner I remember it was Bob Krauss now and
a few guys said, what are you crazy. This is
this is the future. We've got to get aboard. And
they won. And when the downloads came and digital came
and Napster came, it was the same argument, except this
time the lawyers said we have to stop it. In
the lawyers one, people are afraid of the unknown, that's
(07:41):
always been the case, not only in our industry but
in life. But the CD when it finally became popular,
every person who had an LP album had to go
buy the same album in a CD. And during the
eighties the record business laurished because of CDs. It's very
(08:03):
similar to what happened with streaming. It's generating ten times
more buddy than it did when people were buying individual
tracks or whatever you want to call it. So what
I've learned in life is I am always open to
new ideas, open to new people, open to new clients,
because that's where the future is. The future isn't where
(08:25):
people are frozen in a position or in a place.
It's thinking about what is the next step. Let's go
back on the CDs a little bit. Do you think
we would have made the transition to digital finally if
it had not been for Steve Jobs. It's a very
good question, I would say that. But Steve Jobs did
(08:48):
that interim step allowed streaming to come along and be accepted.
If there was no Steve Jobs and he didn't create
what he created, I think it would have been much
more difficult for the record companies to accept streaming. And
do you think the record business, the music business would
still be in the dulg rum because if not for
(09:09):
the subscription services like Spotify, Apple and Amazon, oh yeah,
they'd be slepping along. Oh yeah, it would be entirely different.
I mean, I can't even perceive of where the record
business would be today without streaming. You had a long
history and have had a long history of representing artists,
and many credit you personally for finally getting artists the
(09:30):
money they deserve, yet not undermining the music companies to
help them get that revenue. When did that change began
and was there a particular deal that was the tipping point?
Over time, as I developed more of a reputation, I
had credibility. I was representing so many artists that the
(09:52):
record companies had to listen to what I said and
had to concede to some of the important points that
I want, which was creative control more than they had before,
and financial control in other words, making much better financial deals,
and also the ownership of masters that came along as
(10:13):
I developed more credibility and I became more powerful as
an entity, so that when I was dealing with a
record company and they knew that they weren't dealing with
me with one artist, but they were dealing with me
with twenty artists. I was able to accomplish war. And
I always remembered one of my first clients, who should
be nameless, had an artist on his label, and the
(10:37):
guy had a huge hit, and I said, well, Jesus,
you must owe this guy a fortune. No, no, no,
you know what I did. I rented him a Cadillac
or I bought him. In other words, artists just weren't
getting paid. They were just getting screwed, and it was terrible.
So as time went by, and I recognized this as
(11:00):
well as many other people, but thank god, I eventually
created enough power to be able to change it. Now
artists are paid beyond properly. The companies that are in
the music business, all major public companies, and artists are
now getting their due. They're getting their due in the
areas I just described financially creatively and certain owned their masters.
(11:25):
And I'm very proud of that because I think that
if there's one contribution I've made to the record industry
was what I was able to accomplish for artists. So
let me give you a tip of the hat here.
You weren't always Alan Grugman. When I met you're back
in nineteen eighty you were the guy on the rise,
(11:46):
but not yet the biggest in the business, But in
my mind you were the smartest. Probably not many people
know this story, but MTV was in danger of being
shut down in the first few years. My boss was
fired about a year after MTV launched. By the way,
because of that, I got to move from the creative
side running the product to really building the company as
(12:07):
the COO. But it's interesting to me that when I
sort of hit that and I went from being you
got to make a successful product, which we did, and
then my next challenge was we got to figure out
how to make money. Because the other folks here have
not been successful that they're gone, it's you're on your back.
I reached out to you, and you were not just
a lawyer for us. You were a full partner in
(12:29):
developing the business strategy and operating plan. You made that
jump from being the lawyer to being the business strategist
who as a consultant and trusted advisor to many businesses
and executives. How did you make the jump? I always
believed that to be a great lawyer you have to
(12:51):
be a great businessman. So as soon as I started
practicing law and obtaining clients, I would always be interested
did in the reasoning that they had for their business decisions.
I was never the kind of lawyer that could sit
down and draft contracts or could come up with the
legal arguments. What I had was an enormous amount of
(13:16):
common sense and an understanding of the law and an
understanding of business. So as time went by and I
built the law firm and it got bigger and bigger,
my responsibilities for doing the legal work became less. And
this great group of lawyers we have here, they took
care of the law and I focused on advising clients,
(13:38):
coming up with ideas and negotiating very interesting, lucrative, non
traditional deals for them. But I always considered myself more
of a businessman than a traditional lawyer, and it worked
out fine. I always said, I'm a businessman first and
a lawyer second. So how did having that bigger pick
(14:00):
your view and that higher level access in a company
helped the artist you represented? Oh? In my opinion, life
is all about relationships. The greater the relationships you have
with people, the more positive relationships you have with people,
the more they're going to do for you. So when
(14:23):
I would sit down and negotiate a contract with a
superstar and I'm dealing with the CEO of the company,
who I have a professional relationship with, a personal relationship, etc.
I will do better for my client, the artist, because
of my relationship with the person I'm dealing with. Then
(14:45):
if I didn't have a relationship, take your two hands
and put one finger six inches or twelve inches away
from the other finger. In every negotiation, the finger on
the left is the minimum that you will get, no
matter what your relationship was. That's the minimum you're going
to get. And the right finger is the maximum you're
(15:06):
going to get, no matter if the guy's your brother lawyer,
he's not going to give you more than that. But
if you have great relationships, you will get closer to
the right finger than you will to the left finger
because there's a good feeling there, and especially if I'm
representing people who are worthy of it. But I've seen
(15:27):
artists get terrible deals because their representatives had terrible relationships
with the companies. So relationships is critically important in being
successful in any industry, especially the entertainment industry. So talk
about how you know you've done a good deal. Well,
you know something, I really believe that the best deals
(15:50):
ever made are the deals where both parties walk away
not one hundred percent happy. So, in other words, if
I'm representing a client and I know I've done a
really good deal, I know that I didn't take the
last cent I can get from the person I'm negotiating with.
(16:10):
Because when you make a deal, when one person thinks
that they killed it and the other person thinks that
they get screwed, the person that got screwed is waiting
for the moment to get even. Well, you know, if
Steve Ross had that same philosophy, don't destroy people in
the process because you've got to be in business with them.
(16:31):
What is that great mafia line. You don't wound your enemies,
you kill them. The idea here is if you negotiate
and you end up wounding a person, he's going to
come back and try to kill you. You know. And
what I've been told my whole career is that my
talent is everybody walks away feeling okay, and I've made
(16:56):
phenomenal deals for my clients. And by the way, the
other side, at the end of the day, will say,
you know, Alan got all this from us, but you
know what, we feel okay about it for whatever reasons,
and that's been a tremendous asset to me. So again,
you don't want to make killer deals. You want to
make phenomenal deals, but you don't want to go over
(17:18):
the edge. You know, you're famous for keeping negotiations friendly
and often funny. It's not just your personality or is
that your strategy. Both you can get more done with
a great laugh than you can with a great line.
Mora on math and magic right after this quick break,
(17:41):
welcome back to math and Magic. Let's hear more from
my conversation with Alan Grugman. I want to go back
in time to young Allan. You're a Capricorn, which is
a strong business sign. You were born in nineteen forty two.
You grew up in Brooklyn in the nineteen forties and fifties,
and can you paint us a picture of Brooklyn in
(18:02):
those days and how you grew up Well, okay, I
grew up in Brooklyn, middle class Jewish family. My mother
and father, they were married to the day they died
at the age of eleven. My mother decided she was
a stage mother. For some reason she heard me sing.
She'd say, I would sing myself to sleep. Who the
heck knows, but she ends up getting me an audition
(18:25):
in the television show on NBC. It was called One
or odd a Children's Hour, and it was basically a
group of very talented kids who every Sunday for an hour.
We were on NBC and living in Brooklyn. The only
time you ever were in a limousine was at a funeral.
(18:48):
In other words, as part of the package deal at
the funeral home, you got the front car, which we
know was in there, and then the car right behind
it was a limousine for the family. When I was
on the Children's Hour, every Saturday morning, we would rehearse
at thirty. Rockefeller said that they picked me up in
a limousine and they would take me to rehearsal, and
(19:13):
then after rehearsal, they would take us out to like
great restaurants. Growing up in Brooklyn, the only two restaurants
I ever went to was a Delhi and Chinese Food
on Sunday. So I was on that show for two
years and then my voice changed. That was the end
of it, but it made an enormous impression on me
the entertainment. I said, this is really good, this is fun.
(19:35):
So now I'm still living in Brooklyn. I end up
going to high school, I end up going to college,
and then when I went to Brooklyn Law School, I said,
you know, I remember that everybody in the entertainment business,
you know, going to good restaurants, having fun. And that's
when I decided that I wanted to become an entertainment lawyer.
So growing up in Brooklyn, I grew up in a
(19:57):
very middle class neighborhood. I had a very good family life,
and that exposure to the entertainment business is what motivated
me to after law school, I said, I want to
be an entertainment lawyer. And by the way, some of
the most successful people in show business live in Brooklyn. Obviously,
(20:17):
my dear friend Geffen Lis of Brooklyn, strides in Neil Diamond.
It goes on and on and on. So for some reason,
Brooklyn was this breeding ground for people who end up
in the entertainment industry. Tell me about school. Good student,
not a good student, interested student, have a lot of friends.
To paint the picture a little bit okay. In school,
(20:38):
I was an average athlete and at best an average student.
I was not overly popular. I wasn't like an outcast.
I was a normal, average kid in high school, and
same thing in college. I belonged to a fraternity, but
of course not the best fraternity. And I was always
(21:02):
a very weak student academically. I don't know what the
reason is, you know, maybe I wasn't interested or whatever.
And then I go to Brooklyn Law School. And in
Brooklyn Law School they encouraged you to take a job
after school working for a lawyer in downtown Brooklyn. So
(21:22):
I wanted to be an entertainment lawyer. So my first
year in law school, I got a job at the
William Morris Agency from four to eight at night, like
after school. This is interesting. The second and third year
I was a page at CBS. I would walk into
class every day with a great sports jacket and a
CBS I and everybody would say, what's wrong with Grupping?
(21:46):
Is he crazy? What is he doing showing people to
their seats? What's wrong with them? You know what they
found out about ten years later that there was nothing
wrong with me. If you get my drift, so I'll
put it to you this way. I didn't graduate at
the top of my class, and I'm being very facetious.
(22:07):
And that's why when I graduated and I found a
job working for a lawyer, I couldn't get a job
in a big law firm because I didn't have the grades.
So I started working for a man by the name
of WALTA. Hoefer, who at one time represented the Beatles
in the early sixties. But that's the progression of my
life up until the time I started my own practice
(22:29):
in seventy four. Basically that was it, and I was
very lucky. You know, I'm a big believer that luck
is seventy five percent of the game and brains is
twenty five percent. If you don't get that seventy five
percent of luck, the twenty five percent of brains is useless.
(22:50):
One time, Elton John said to me, Alan, there are
a thousand Elton Johns in this world, but I was
the one that got that great opportunity, and that his
luck is being in the right place at the right time.
And I've been very, very lucky, beyond lucky. So you
start your firm in the mid seventies. By the late seventies,
(23:11):
the legendary Walter yet Nikof was at its peak of
power and not yet at his peak of craziness head
of CBS Records, You were one of the few people
who he would listen to in respect. What did you
learn from Walter? What made him great in spite of
his problems. He told me a great expression, it's not
(23:33):
about the money. It's about the money. Now what do
I mean by that? Walt yet Nikov was a lawyer.
He went to Columbia, he practiced law, and then he
ended up being CEO of CBS Records. He didn't understand music.
It isn't like he was looking for talent like Clive Davis.
(23:53):
But you know what, as soon as there was somebody
that became very successful, he bring him into the and
he'd say, boys, let's renegotiate your contract. And he would
renegotiate the contract and give him tons of money, and
then they would love him. That's what I realized that
a very important part of everybody's career is not only
(24:16):
the creative, it's also the monetary. The music business is
made up of music and business. That's when I realized
how critically important the business side of the music businesses,
and the people who know how to handle that side
of the business are the ones that do very very well.
That's what I learned from him. I learned that you
(24:37):
take care of people because if they as I said before,
if you take care of them, they're going to take
care of you. And all these artists loved him, whether
it was Michael Jackson, whether it was Spreaks before he
went crazy, Billy Joel, they all loved him. You know why.
He made sure that they made a lot of money.
(24:59):
So at a certain point you realized you had skills
and relationships beyond music, and you could provide services beyond
negotiating just entertainment deals. When did you have that epiphany?
What started it for you? In two thousand? In late nineties,
I saw that the music business was going through a
very strange period. There was all kinds of the stealing
(25:23):
of music, and I said, I better expand my horizons.
And I started hiring a couple of lawyers who knew
movies and television, etc. Etc. And I did that as
a defense mechanism because I thought maybe the music practice
would be dramatically hurt if all of a sudden the
way it used to function will no longer function. And
(25:44):
then I started bringing him some guys. I hired some
people that knew these other areas, and today I would
say music is probably the most fifty percent of the practice.
So it's one of the few times I had great
foresight that was a big transition for you. No one,
by the way, had ever done that in the music
business on that side of it. What's the business lesson
(26:07):
here in that transformation of your firm. The business lesson is,
it's just like if you're a lawyer and you have
one client and you're dependent upon that client, that puts
you in a very weak position. You will always be
much stronger if you have ten clients then if you
have one or two. The same thing here. I was
(26:29):
nervous that the music business was going to go through
a terrible period, and I said, oh my god, if
that happens, I don't have anything to fall back on.
So by developing clients in all different areas, whether it's movies, television, sports, journalism, theater,
(26:50):
if one area is soft, it gets picked up by
the other areas. So I came to realize how important
it was to diverse fy legally, and I was right
because the fact that I wasn't just a music law
firm anymore. But we did other things just gave us
more prestige, more credibility, and eventually became much more lucrative.
(27:16):
And today, you know, we represent all kind of We
represent CEOs, we represent media companies, represent record companies, represent
Iought Radio Live. It goes on and on, and that
is because we diversify. You were one of the early
founders right in the beginning when I'm in Rnigan and
Jan Winner put together the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
(27:39):
This year, you were the first music attorney to ever
be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
for your contributions to the business and obviously to the artist.
That's heavy stuff for a guy who was singing on
a children's show on NBC from Brooklyn. Give us just
a couple of minutes of how that felt. You know,
it's interesting. One of my dearest friends is a guy
(28:02):
by the name of David Geffen that some of your
audience might know, some might not. He's an enormously successful guy,
grew up in Brooklyn, not far from where I grew up,
And we've had the following conversation. Could we have ever
imagined when we were growing up that we would be
in the position we're in now it was incomprehensible because
(28:27):
when we were growing up, if you were rich, you
lived in Great Neck or you lived in Scarsdale. It
was a whole different level of success and wealth. So
what I think about my life now, I couldn't have perceived.
I mean, I've but just been so lucky. I couldn't
perceive that I would ever be able to live the
(28:49):
life I lived now. And it's as simple as that.
Let's get some advice from you. If someone's starting in
the music business today, what would you tell him in
what area. Let's say they're going to start on the
business side of the music business today, you know what
I would say to them. If let's say we're talking
about lawyers hypothetically, I would say, if you can work
(29:11):
for a large firm, you should do that for a
few years because they will train you to be a
great lawyer, and then you'll come to me. In terms
of business, I am a big believer in entrepreneurship. To
become a successful entrepreneur as extraordinarily unusual. But if you succeed,
the world is open to you. There are two kinds
(29:32):
of people. There are people who were destined to be
employees and executives, and then there were people that were
destined to be entrepreneurs. You basically have always had the
mentality of an entrepreneur, even though you ran companies, but
you always thought like an entrepreneur. So let's go to
some more advice. How about someone who's renegotiating their employment contract. Well,
(29:57):
first of all, it depends on what they lever and
if they have leverage, I would tell them to be
very aggressive, because you know, it's the old story. I
always say to people, if I ask for the absurd,
I end up getting the semi absurd, whereas if you
ask for the reasonable, you end up with less than reasonable.
(30:20):
So if somebody is renegotiating their contract and they're doing
a great job, don't be afraid to ask, because my
grandmother used to say, if you don't ask, you don't get. So,
if you could go back in time and give some
advice to your twenty one year old self, what would
(30:40):
that advice be. I would have said, follow your love
and your passion, which is what I did, and be
as pleasantly aggressive as you can be. You shouldn't be
obnoxiously aggressive, but when people see that you are ambitious
and you're aggressive, in the right way, you will get
(31:04):
much farther than if you play it safe. So we
normally end every episode of Math and Magic with a
shout out to the greats of math and magic and business.
But given who you are and in your eighty years,
the people you've encountered, can you give us the three
or four people you've encountered who you stick in your
(31:26):
mind as the legends the greats? Well, I would probably
have to say Steve Ross was this brilliant, brilliant man
who created Warner Brothers. I would say him. I had
the opportunity to meet Bill Paley, who was a phenomenal
and creative businessman. And let's tell people who Bill Paley
(31:48):
was started CBS. And although people don't know who's Bill
Paley is today, which shocks me. Bill Paley in the
sixties seventies could not have been more powerful, you know
he found at CBS. In the record business, he was
very controversial. But Ahmed Ertigan was a true legend. David
Geffin obviously was a great inspiration to me, and I'll
(32:11):
tell you that story. I met David Geffin in nineteen
eighty one when I was making a deal with him
with Hall and Oates, and we hit it off immediately
and we became very very good friends over the years,
and he has been a tremendous booster of mine. But
you know, David Geffin is an example of a true entrepreneur.
(32:34):
And he never built CBS or he never built the
General Motors, but as an entrepreneur he was always phenomenally successful,
first as a manager, then as a record executive, and
then an owner of dream Work. He was always very,
very successful, and he was always been very important in
(32:54):
my life. Alan, you are a unique human being and
so much touch so many people, me included. Thanks for
being with us today and thanks for all you've done
my pleasure, Bob, and thank you for inviting me. Here
are a few things I picked up in my conversation
with Alan. One, embrace the future. When the music industry
(33:18):
jumped from records to CDs to streaming, Alan was always
on the side of the future. Work with progress, not
against it. New developments will keep your business thriving. Two.
Don't wound your enemies and negotiations. Don't ring your opponent
drial that will just leave them feeling vengeful. A successful
(33:38):
deal is one that's fair on both ends and leaves
each side feeling pretty good about what they got. Three
Build relationships. Alan's the first to admit that he didn't
get to where he is by being top of his class.
It's his personality and ability to form relationships that built
a strong reputation. Forming and maintaining friendship, so colleagues can
(34:01):
only help you in the long run. It's easier to
make a good deal when you know the person sitting
across the table. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's
it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to
(34:22):
Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio. The show is
hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sidney Rosenbloom for
booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat.
Our editor Emily Maronoff, our engineer Jessica Kranchich, Our executive
producers Nikki Etre and Ali Perry, and of course Gail Raoul,
Eric Angel Noel and everyone who helped bring this show
(34:45):
to your ears. Until next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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