Archive for the 'Music Business' Category


The Model Is Broken

It’s very well-established. You take your time to record an album and you keep it alive on terrestrial radio. In the best of circumstances you dribble out track after track, keeping the album alive for years. But that was then and this is now. The “Billboard” chart has become irrelevant. It’s completely manipulated. Want to […]

Re-Billy Strings

Hey Bob I don’t think you’ll be surprised that we’ve been fortunate enough to have hosted Billy several times at Newport Folk.  Hell, we even had him play two different sets/days last year coming out of covid. One where he played a “traditional” set dedicated to the bluegrass masters before him and one where he […]

More Blackwell

I was island EVP/General Manger for Chris for two years and while the comments talk about his A&R expertise and his tremendous ability to foresee the way music was going, I’ll write about Chris as a label chief. He gave the staff extraordinary freedom to market and promote, never interfering or second-guessing what we did. I never had such […]

Billy Strings

He’s big everywhere but Texas. And maybe Santa Barbara. But in the rest of America HE SELLS OUT! This is the artist development story of the year, and it’s been growing for the last half decade. Strings is finally breaking through. You might have seen him briefly during the Grammy telecast, then again he was […]