Alan Cross

0:25Thanks so much for doing this. You're welcome. Nice to see you again. You too. We're going to start at the beginning this time. All right. Do you remember the first record you listened to that blew your mind and you're like, this is what I need to do for a career. I remember my aunt Olga giving me Johnny Cash live at San Quentin when I was really, really small because I was a big fan of a boy named Sue and drove my mum crazy because I was a bleeped-up person in the song. And I remember thinking, wow, this is really rather interesting. And then it wasn't so much records for a period after that as it was just the radio because I was growing up in a small town just outside of Winnipeg and you were a million miles from anything.

1:11So my grandma gave me a radio for my sixth birthday and all this music and all this noise and sounds and voices and information. The news came in from all these different places and I just thought, wow, maybe there's more to the world than my eight square blocks. And that's what made you get into radio and not music. Do you ever pick up an instrument? You ever play an instrument? Oh, yeah. No, I have a... Okay. Everybody in our family had to play an instrument. Oh, really? Yes. And I was assigned, initially, the accordion. Oh, it's cool in some circles? I did manage to get all the way to grade eight in accordion and I was in music festivals and that sort of thing. Later though, when I was able to be a little bit more forceful with my parents, I took up

2:00the drums, which I still play. Oh, cool. You still play like an abandoned or anything? No, just for fun in the garage. Just for fun in the basement. Nice. Talk about explore music and the genesis behind this new project. Well, I guess not so new anymore. Now, we started this back in the, I guess it would be the summer of 2008, when we really got this whole thing going. And the idea was that people are becoming more accustomed to accessing media on demand, on their own terms, getting whatever you want, wherever you want, wherever you happen to be on whatever device you happen to have. And that's cool, but there's got to be a second half of it. If there's an infinite number of bands and songs out there. All you're going to run into is an infinite amount of hurt, because where do you start?

2:49You spend all this time researching and searching for music and not enough time savoring it. And then when you do find something you like, you try to consume it as best you can. There's something nagging in the back of your mind that says, well, what is everybody else listening to? And is this the best I could possibly get? So when the internet first came along, I guess really with the evolution of MP3 players in the late 90s or the age part of the first decade of the 20th century, especially after the iPod came up, people just swung to this infinite variety of music. That was practically free or free. But after a while it became very, very, very, very confusing. Where do I start? So now the pendulum is swinging back.

3:35So that with a lot of things online, people are beginning to look for edited, curated, filtered lists of content that they will help them on their way to finding something cool. YouTube is a great example. You know, that 20 hours of video is being uploaded to YouTube every minute. That's crazy. Every minute. That's incredible. So where do you go? I'm going to sit down and watch YouTube tonight. Great. Best of luck. Same thing with music. I'm going to sit down and discover some new music tonight. Great. Best of luck. You need people who fulfill the original mandate of the old school radio DJ, whereas you

4:24find somebody that you trust and that person, he or she, or into the case of certain algorithmic verses like Pandora or Last of Him, they will tell you what you hopefully need to know. They will tell you what's cool. They will make recommendations. If you want to be this cool person or you want to be into that scene, you need to buy this record or go see this band. And that's what we'll do. What happened to radio? I mean, you ran a station for a long time. Why don't we have those trusted? You might be the only person in this country actually that's still able to, you know, here's five new songs every day for any new stuff. It's possible. Radio is evolved. It's not radio's fault. It's the audience. Back in the old days, you would, you know, with the broadcasting model was one thing to

5:12many people. And if you wanted that one cool thing, you had to wait for the radio station or the TV station or whatever to deliver it to you on their time. If you wanted to watch all in the family, it was eight o'clock, Sunday night on CBC, end of story. No choice. But then, you know, with VCRs, with CD burners, with mix tapes, with iPods, with DVDs and all these things, we have become accustomed to getting what we want, wherever we happen to be, on whatever noise we have to have. And you know, radio as a music transmission device service. You can't do that for you. It can't. It's technology that dates back to, you know, 110 years now.

6:00So rather than people wanting to wait for their favorites on to come up, they just go and get it, wherever they happen to be, on whatever device they happen to have. So, a radio is going to be around for a long time, you know, it's not going to go away, but at the same time, as a music recommender, as a driver of music sales, it will gradually have, it's gradually losing the influence of one hat, one hat. It's not a radio's fault. It's just the way the music band is involved. Technology's fault. It's technology's fault. What do you see as the future for radio in that regard, at least the music stations? Individually custom streams.

6:47Right now, I'm kind of a fan of what Spotify is trying to do in the UK. We can't get a D.R. Of course, it's worth Canadian. And we can't be, we should be happy with what we have. And I think customized streams that follow us wherever we go. Some sort of cloud-based thing, it could be as simple as something like Apple, for example, a company called Lala. They go to your iTunes library, they discover what songs you have on your iTunes library, and using whatever magical device Steve Jobs comes up next, comes up with next, you will be able to access your library from the cloud, wherever you are. Now that's your stuff, the stuff that you purchased or assimilated or whatever on your hard drive. Right. Because your legal music. But there will be other things that are going to require music discovery.

7:35And that's where the trusted filters come in. How does a young band get to airplay then? Why would you want to airplay? Well, that's just the model everyone's used to. Right. So what does a young band do to get out there more? Play more gigs. The idea, the value proposition of me recording something and giving you it to you on a piece of plastic in exchange for money is done. CD sales are going to continue to slide. I mean, if the biggest selling album in 2009 is Susan Boyle, if the Grammy Awards that we saw the other night are the highest rated Grammy Awards in six years with Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga and Beyonce. I mean, that tells you what Massapeel is now. That tells you who's buying CDs.

8:21If you're not in with that crowd. Which I think a lot of people are. Well, obviously. Yeah. But if you're in a band and you want to do something that doesn't really fit the Grammy mold, I mean, it's social networking. It's Facebook. It's MySpace. It's Twitter. It's giving away your music. It's gigs, gigs, gigs. It's coming to people like me. It's coming to people like CDC Radio 3. It's trying to get your stuff on pitchfork. All that sort of stuff. It's coming to people like you. How does a band come to you and pitch you a song? They're looking around. It's just CD after CD. They have a hard drive full of MP3. Well, that's the thing. You even get a chance to listen to everything? Try to get through most of them. You can tell if it's not worth my time. So if somebody sends me, I got here. This is a great one.

9:07A woman came up to me at a conference I was at. She gave me a burn CD. No cover. And all it said on it was in Sharpie. It said, some of my crap. You think I listened to that one? Not a chance. Fair enough. But if you take your time and you showed me that you're a professional band, that with good looking CD or good looking presentation or good looking website or something like that, I'll pay attention. Because obviously you care about what you're doing. You care what you're art. And if you care, well, then maybe I will. Back to explore music for a minute and the talk show. Because there's more than just music now. You're talking about music with people in the industry of Tzavski and Warren from Sony on the show the other day.

9:54Tell me about going into those shows. Because that's a very different thing for you. Yeah, well, we don't know what we're making this up as we go along. We have a radio show. Actually, at the core of this is exploremusic.com, the website. That's where we think everything is going to emanate from. So surrounding that, we have the radio show, which hopefully drives people to the website for more. We've got a partnership with OxTV, who are on cable systems in parts of Canada. And it is basically off the record from TSN, turned into music. So me and a bunch of people with deep thoughts and shab up the music issues of the week. Then sort of a charter part of this is a freelance thing I do, which is a weekly column for the Metro newspapers. And the whole idea is to feed back into this website.

10:41Now, the website itself is evolving, because again, we are exploring, along with everybody else in this business, what the audience, what individuals want when it comes to discovery and music recommendation. We started that one path. No, that wasn't it. We started out another path, and it worked for a while, and audience behavior changed. So we're trying something else. And it's not like we're not successful. We are. It's just that we want to be the biggest, the best. And we have to keep following the way things are evolving is people online and people looking for music online go. Well, I noticed speaking of being online and all that,

11:26you're tweeting a lot more than you used to. And that obviously was something that had to come. Yeah. And Facebook. And YouTube channel and all those things. So yeah, I mean, you got to talk to people using the tools that people are using. And we'll use Facebook and Twitter as long as there was other things. We'll use that. Will you use an iPad? Oh, yeah. Do you need an iPad? I do because I want to see. It's not the place. It is what behavior the device will encourage. And we don't know what that behavior is yet. For example, when the very first Walkman came out in 1979,

12:14the idea of walking around with headphones on in public, sealing yourself off on the rest of humanity was considered to be the height of any social behavior. For that reason, the very first walkman had two headphone jacks. So you could share with your friends. Now, that disappeared within a couple of years when it became apparent that people wanted to develop themselves in a completely controlled, customized bubble of music. No one saw that coming with the Walkman. And now just walked down the street. Everybody's got some sort of earbuds bump in your ear, in your ear. And then that in itself has changed listener behavior. It has changed the way people consume music. It has changed the way people value music. It's changed the way people seek out music.

13:00And no one saw that coming. No one at all. So when this iPad comes along, what kind of behaviors is it going to create? iPhone. Nobody saw the App Store coming. Nobody saw the success of the App Store coming. It's fundamentally changed the way people do a lot of things. Like I feel naked if I don't leave home without my iPhone, because it has all these apps, forget about the headphone phone, that has all these apps that allow me to do things on my time and on my terms. Whether it be check the weather, or check my Facebook page, or tweet something, or rent a car through Ava's. I have an Ava's iPhone. I check my flight when I'm flying through Air Canada or La Tans or something. All day on the iPhone. And I don't have to sit down at a computer anymore.

13:47I have to make a phone call. I don't want to answer right there in my hand. And that has changed fundamentally my behavior when it comes to interacting with information. And it's also changed my expectations of information. And that I get it now. Do you think that's good for society? That we want everything immediately? It's just inevitable. I don't think it has as good or bad. It's just the way we move on. Yeah. We don't have a choice. I mean, the whole idea is we want what we want, when we want it, wherever we have to be, on whatever device we have in a hat. Back to Twitter for a second. You were tweeting through the Grammys. What are your thoughts on the show? Looking back on it, I know everyone was like Taylor, so I can't sing blah, blah, blah. No, it's a horrible show. But again, they had 26 million people watching, which was the highest rated Grammy show in six years.

14:33And they're probably going to sell a lot of records this week. Beyonce records and Lady Gaga records. And Taylor Swift's going to probably sell another 300,000 records, which is the whole point of the Grammy Awards. It has nothing to do with celebrating musical excellence. It has to do with, in the dead period between the first of January and the first day of spring, getting more people to buy records that are already out. That's what the, that's what any award show is. Why do you think all the award shows are from just before Christmas to just before the end of March? Is to get people to go out and see things or buy things or listen to things that have already been released for quite some time. So we can get into the second quarter of the year and start bombarding you with new stuff. That's how it works.

15:19That's a very interesting belt that I never thought of before. Everyone thinks of you as a music guy. Everyone knows Alan Cross is the music guy. But you've got to be other things you're into as well. Yeah, a travel. Well, I'm a huge travel guy. I live for travel. I'm sure this new job allows you to travel a little more doing interviews in different places. Well, certain things are coming together in two weeks from today, I have to go to Norway. I'm going to a music festival called the By-Lar Music Festival, which is the largest music festival in Scandinavia. And it's all these bands. Just on the cusp, all these cutting edge bands that are being showcased at this festival with hopes of bringing it worldwide. There's like 200 bands. Plus, there's all these seminars. I mean, Alan McGee from Creation Records, the guy who discovered Oasis, Cara Bartos from Craft Work,

16:09a Peter Hook from New Order, Jeff Travis from Roughfield Records. So you're breading butter. You love that British stuff, that's British 80s, 90s? Yeah, this is great. So I can't wait to go. It'd be very cool. Bill Drummond from the KLF is going to be there doing something, which would probably be weird. So yeah, it will be a very interesting three days. It's going to be very interesting to see how Explore Music evolves as well over the next little while. Yeah. And again, we have an idea of where we want to go and how we want to do it. But there is no guarantee that we're doing it right. Some guarantee that somebody won't get there before us. Or we could stumble upon something. And it could blow up worldwide, really huge.

16:57But again, a lot of it will depend on the devices. For example, with cars. Cars are turning into $30,000 home theaters. What kind of behavior, what kind of music consumption, what kind of entertainment, media consumption, is going to result when every car is a rolling home theater. When you can get whatever you want, whenever you happen to be, in your dashboard. Or dangerous roads. So it's going to be good. I mean, they'll cripple the devices. Or they'll set them up in such a way that you can only do things when the car is stationary. But you'll have, right now, you have two types of radio. You'll listen to it in real time, like with a morning show. When you want to be entertained, any way to work.

17:42Or if you go to work at 10 o'clock and you miss the morning show, you just hit the button. And you listen to the morning show, because it's available on demand. After it's done. You'll have built-in GPS into your car. So instead of waiting for your traffic together on the ones, you hit the traffic button. GPS determines exactly where you are, and gives you a map, or a text, or a visual or oral warning of the traffic in your area. Not something 20 miles away. You want weather? Ooh. Weather now for your immediate area, and the direction that you're heading. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that we're going to be seeing very, very soon. And the interesting thing is that radio companies are uniquely positioned to be able to do this, because what we've been doing for 110 years, audio.

18:28So we just have to figure out a way to package the stuff that we're already doing for these new devices and for these new behaviors. Seems like a lot of music guys are becoming technology guys. Half to it. Half to it, because music has always driven technology, and technology has always driven music. You can go back all the way to the beginning. And ever since, if you leave out the whole concept of building musical instruments, ever since Thomas Edison, actually there was a guy in France in 1860 who created something called a photo autograph, who first come up with a visual representation of what music looked like, what sound looked like. Ever since then, you know, the technology

19:14has driven music as driven technology. One last question for you. Because you're who you are. Give us one band that we need to know about. Band that I really like right now is a, they're called Delphic, D-E-L-P-H-I-C. They're from Britain. And somebody in the office says, they sound like really cool spa music. So it's like interesting electronic about with an indie bitch indie band. I think it's really, really kind of cool.