What's Next for the Music World? - A Justin Little Production

It's been a rough year for performing artists, for whom audiences are like oxygen, and vice versa. Few people are better positioned to explore the strange quandary in which we find ourselves than Justin Little, a founder of Bailey Blues, a boutique agency representing K. Flay, The Midnight and Jake Etheridge among others. It is a fascinating conversation with a key insider in the music industry that could have gone on for hours. Now living in Ojai, Little has lived and breathed music since his teens living in West Texas and the Bay Area. When fresh out of college, he had to choose between a low-paying backstage job and a highly paid position producing this new-fangled media called podcasts, he chose music. Among the first shows he produced, and artists he represented, were Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, and The Postal Service, so he saw the indie music world explode in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He worked in a milieu surrounded by such superstars like Feith, Grizzly Bear, Glen Hansard and The Frames.  Justin tells a few anecdotes, among his inexhaustible trove, about the burgeoning indie scene, escorting Paul Simon backstage to meet Grizzly Bear musicians just before a show, touring with Death Cab and the Postal Service. We talk about the disruption of the digital shift, bit-torrent, how the musical economy works and doesn't, of innovations going on behind the scenes, and the hunger and thirst audiences have for connection. And, of course, as listeners have come to expect, we talk about the Roarin' Twenties, and how much we look forward to the coming creative flourishing we are sure is right around the bend. A partial list of references: Djesse (Jacob Collier), "Love & Mercy," Daniel Johnston, "Super Mensch," Kate Tempest, Dea Matrona & Band Maid. We did not talk about Dinosaur Junior, Neil Diamond or the cast of "Lost."