Derrick Michaud: Hi, Graham. Thanks for having me.

Graham Brown: Great to speak to you. You're an audio guy through and through not a late comer to the scene. What was your background in audio?

Derrick Michaud: I got my start in audio and radio, terrestrial radio, dinosaur radio, and I was very lucky. I was 17 years old, senior in high school and at a media class in the tech section of the high school. My high school was actually a hub among other towns. And we had a tech course central location for all these different towns that handled small engines, woodworking, so on and so forth. And there was a media technology class and I'm a musician and it was like, okay, that sounds interesting. I get to turn knobs and play with audio. That's worth a few credits. And the teacher had a connection and the history in radio knew some people in the industry and he caught word that a radio company, near my school needed, what's called a board operator. And in essence, what you're doing is you are playing a live syndicated show. Let's say it's based out of Washington DC, and you're feeding it to your local market and you monitor it and then you play a local commercial. That was my start. And then I worked my way up eventually through different levels of management. And then finally landed in something that I really enjoyed, which was commercial production literally like making commercials that ran live on air. Promos, PSA's commercials, working with pro tools, working in a nice studio, pulling in different DJs to voice read scripts for me, adding sound effects and putting together real live, what they call spot for local businesses and became that liaison between the production side and the sales staff, because they're the ones that actually selling the advertising. So I did that for a couple of years and it was very cool and I enjoyed it, but when it comes to learning how to use pro tools fully, you're not going to get the full spectrum experience like you would working with bands. That's a totally different beast, but nonetheless, it definitely gave me a lot of skills and tools that eventually came in very handy for me when I started the podcast journey.

Graham Brown: I'm fascinated by those radio commercials. In some ways they have become very stylized. You have those commercials where you have the ten second disclaimer at the end, which is read at sort of four times speed. Isn't that your goal, that kind of stuff. What does a commercial producer know that your average person doesn't know about those spots?

Derrick Michaud: Well, that super fast disclaimer is not read that way. And that's, we do the chipmunk treatment to it. A lot of people don't understand that a commercial is literally 30 seconds long to the point or 60 seconds or 45 seconds. And you do a lot of what's called time compression. Well, you get it. You get the commercial within a few seconds. So let's say it's a 32nd spot and you do all the editing and you got it down to 32 seconds. Well, you can time compress that? So it's exactly 30 seconds and it doesn't quite affect the voice. It doesn't make a sound fast for slow, which in whatever direction you're moving in. So a lot of people don't realize that because radio, especially now more than ever, is all programmed and everything needs to be exact. So when they break into a six minute commercial break, it needs to be exactly six minutes. So that no one would ever understand that no one's listening to a commercial with their stopwatch, and often you hear a nice voice on a commercial and it's the secretary from down the hall or it's someone that works in finance or one of the accountants just comes down and read something for you, and you're good, so what happens in house stays in house. But, other than that, look before I started doing it. When you listen to the radio, the commercials just kind of glide over you. You kinda just, it's kind of background until you finally get back to music, or honestly, you switch stations. You go to the next stations, but there's a lot of work that goes into the higher end stuff where it's almost like it's painting a picture with audio real sound effects of 30 seconds to tell a story and convince someone to buy into something without visuals. So television that you can just have some, that looks pretty a lot of imagery and you don't need a lot of talking,you don't need a lot of texts or, they can put some texts on the screen, but you're seeing the product on the radio. You've got to paint that picture. You have to put it in the person's mind, what it looks like, and to do that in 30 seconds is tricky. So really what it comes down to is this copyright. Which I didn't have to do, thankfully. That's the essence of radio commercials ,is that writing, to be able to put all that information in a short amount of time is challenging.

Graham Brown: Well, a lot of people are now talking about podcasts as a format for commercials, and we're seeing the early experimentation on the way of literally taking the format and dumping it into podcasts. It's almost a repeat of what would happen on radio. I'm looking in that and thinking surely that's probably step one, but step two is then expanding the format to be what it could be. Not limited. Like you say, everything in radio was format, was program and it had to be exactly 30 seconds because at 30 seconds past the hour, this commercial kicked in. And it couldn't be any dead time, even five seconds. However, with podcasts, we've now got flexibility. We don't have that air time shelf space, if you like. So when you see people moving into podcasts and recreating those commercials, what do you think? Do you think that is as good as it can be? Or do we need to kind of think out of the box a little bit about how commercials can be on podcasts?

Derrick Michaud: Well, from my experience, listening to podcasts, often the commercial is what we'd call a live read. The host just got a script, the bullet point. And when they go into a new segment, they're doing it on the fly. And that's usually you'll hear them do a commercial for ZipRecruiter or stamps.com or some of these very common podcasts, friendly advertisers that understand the reach that podcasts have as far as other things that I've heard, that's more like radio. And quite honestly, I've produced some podcasts that's more typical on the radio in the sense of you've got a segment, you've got music that fades you into a commercial. It's a 60 minute break. I'm sorry. 60 second break. And then go into segment number two and all those situations that I've done, that it's pretty similar to the radio, same format .You always want to have what's called a bumper music. That's another big radio term as bumpers. You don't want to just go from talking straight into a commercial. You want to have that music that pads you in, transitions you out of the segment into a commercial. And then the back end of the commercial transitions you back into the next segment. And then after that, Podcasting is, I would say, more basic. You'd basically have a voiceover over music. There's your ad. And a lot of radio ads were that way too. There were some simple ones too, but then the higher paying clients that wanted the higher end ads that were being played the best time of the day, those were the, those were multi-layered sound effects, but they were paying big bucks for those. So podcasts, as we know, are shoestring budgets, and it's usually the host doing the ad too. So, but throwing a commercial in the middle of a podcast is a nice way to break things up a little bit. You can pivot, so you can say, you can make the second segment, something a little different. And another trick is when you're coming out of a commercial heading back into that second segment, you add a unique bumper that announces what this next segment is. So it's a way of kind of guiding someone through the format. What I will say in the 80 plus podcasts I have touched since I started this, 1% put ads in their podcasts or fake ads. It's really just a throw and go intro, intro monologue, little music, interview, outro. Goodnight. It's very basic because no this isn't radio. You got a lot of radio shows that pivoted to podcasting like Adam Corolla is a big one, early on when he lost his deal at K rock and California. When they stationed flipped, what they call flipped formats, and went from rock to modern country or whatever, while there's no space for Adam Corolla on that. So they let him and his crew go and they pivoted early on before podcasting was really anything. It was like what's that? And iTunes was still a browser. There wasn't any kind of app yet. And Adam Corolla was a big reason why podcasts as a medium started growing. But what he did was he didn't start a podcast. He basically continued his radio show. Recorded it and published it as a podcast. So you have like the purists, the podcast purists out there kind of shy away from that. They want, from what I've read, a lot of the purists, they want grainy background noise to people just talking for an hour namelessly. That's to them podcasting.

Graham Brown: We were at that sort of stage one of podcasts, we've gone beyond that in terms of possibility.

Derrick Michaud: Oh, for sure. And yes, absolutely. So now I'm very fortunate to work with a lot of great, whether it be companies, entrepreneurs, CEOs. They finally understand and realize the power of podcasting as a marketing tool. And that's when things really started firing up because it didn't become, I want to have a podcast for entertaining people, getting downloads, or I really want to get a bunch of downloads and try to make money doing this. Now, and in my opinion, the correct way to look at podcasting as a tool. To market your brand. It's just another extension. Just like when Facebook was its new thing. And all of a sudden businesses realized, oh, I guess I need to be on there. I don't know what it is, but I need to be there. And then now you've got Facebook ads and you get Instagram and all of these new little social media hubs became new branches from the main tree of the company. You needed print, you needed blogs, you needed social media, you need YouTube well, now, you know what? Now you need podcasts and people understand the power of it because you can interview other people. That's how you network within your industry and that networking in essence, we'll eventually circle around and make you money. If you're trying to promote your business through podcasting and within that networking while interviewing other people in your industry and you land a couple clients because of those people that you met. There's your monetary gain and the right people are getting it, and they're willing to throw some money at podcasting, even though you don't really have direct monetary gain from it. But it's a big picture. And look, I have experienced this in the last two plus years now, three years now that I've been doing this, I've seen it firsthand. It's like wildfire. You'd be amazed at how many people out there have budgets willing to spend for podcasting. It's remarkable.

Graham Brown: Yeah, the time is now. Hey, Derek, what I want to do is just a quick, there's a couple of things I want to discuss with you, obviously. I want to do a quick fire round with you as a radio and audio pro, I want to shoot some terms for you, and I want you to tell us exactly what they mean. These are, yeah, it's a test. It's like getting your license again, right?

Derrick Michaud: Here we go.

Graham Brown: Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to shoot some terms at you and educate us on what these mean, and then maybe we can dive into what they could mean for podcasts as well. So just short definitions would be great of these. Are you ready ?

Derrick Michaud: I think so. Yeah.

Graham Brown: Come on let's do it. Bumper.

Derrick Michaud: Okay. Yeah. So, again in radio, it is a transitional piece. It's taking you from one thing to the next, whether it be again, leading you into a commercial coming out of a news break, going back into a new segment, a bumper is often also called a sweeper or jingle because it will have the singing or a quick, a little voiceover, literally a three-second forward. Now you're listening to such and such, boom next. So that's the bumper is, okay, you're watching the David Letterman show and David Letterman throws it to a commercial. You hear that music fire up and then they show Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra as then it fades into the commercial. That's a bumper.

Graham Brown: The key here is, keeping the audience’s attention. Isn't it? And making them feel that drop-off it's seamless. Isn't it. Otherwise, you lose them and they're onto the next one. Next one Derek is Stinger. What’s different printed bumpers?

Derrick Michaud: Very similar. A stinger is. That's so great. You're asking these now. I'm liking this cause this is. A stinger is very short, and it can be, let's say you're doing a segment, like a top 10 segment, and you're just running down the top 10 best guitarists. And in between, you say number 10 and you give a little of your opinion. You're the host, you're giving your reasoning why you feel like Jimmy Page is number 10 and after 60 seconds, as you transitioned into number nine, you hit a stinger and it's some kind of sound effect that all right, flip seats to the next one now. A stinger is often using news in between news reads, the traditional news broadcasters telling a story and now it's now time to move on to the next story in the middle east. And then you get a stinger, boom. And it just separates topics, ideas. You can literally hit that stinger and you're onto the next topic or story or whatever.

Graham Brown: Excellent. We'll give you full marks for these. What's the mid role?

Derrick Michaud: Now we're talking podcasting Midroll is a commercial and it's in the middle of the podcast. And sometimes it's an actually produced thing, with a music bed and a voiceover. But like I said earlier in podcasting, a lot of it is live reads. So right in the middle or in the middle of the episode, the host will break into the commercial and they have an outline and somewhat of our script. But they're encouraged to ad-lib too, that's encouraged. And then you have pre-roll and post role, in those same, I would say the pre-roll is much more scripted and prerecorded, and then you just, you place it right in the front before they produce the intro. And then obviously the post role is on the out, but yeah, Midroll.

Graham Brown: We'll give you 10 out of 10 for that one. One from the radio world, syndication.

Derrick Michaud: Yes. So going back to my roots, I was a board operator for a show called the Don and Mike show. And they were based out of Washington, DC and much like Howard Stern, these guys started local. Howard stern is massive, but there was a time when he was just a local DJ. He worked his way up to major markets but he was still a local, even though he was in New York. Well, once you start gaining some real traction in some real ratings stations from around the country, we'll buy you. Like we want Howard Stern in the morning in our market in Phoenix, Arizona, let's say, and there's, I don't know all the ins and outs on the business side of that, but they make it happen. So. W Neu, where one of the New York stations Howard Stern was at works out some kind of deal with another radio station and they're getting kicked back from advertising. That's the local advertising that they're doing during Howard Stern's show. And then now that just branches Howard Stern out, or the show that I used to do called Don and Mike, and then you have all these little board operators all over the country. Like I was doing, I would take the feed from the host, if you will. And play it to my market, let the national commercials go, and then we would get two minutes of each break. Let's say it was a six-minute commercial break. We would get the last two minutes in our local area. You do what's called a dump. You dump the network and then you put on your local commercials. So syndication is just that, you have your host in one studio and then that station basically sells the show all over the country to different radio stations and they syndicate that way.

Graham Brown: So the advertising is both baked in at the local level. So from Howard Stern, if you like, and then they also give you, like you say, two minutes space to put your station’s commercials.

Derrick Michaud: And that's the selling point. It's like, well, once you have our highly rated number one host, go on your station and I'll wait to pay you if we'll let you have ad space and then of course, yeah, I mean, Howard Stern lands in your market, you're going to sell some commercials.

Graham Brown: So in that model, would you, I mean, just very vaguely, I know it's case by case, but in that syndication model, the local, let's say, the station down in Tennessee, would license Howard Stern's content from New York that would come with the New York advertisers or the national advertisers and your spots for the local Tennessee advertisers as well. Who's paying who in that or is it a straight swap? Like, okay, you get the space and we get to promote our national advertisers down in Tennessee. How does that generally work?

Derrick Michaud: It's a mixture, a show like Howard Stern, you're paying some money for Howard Stern and you get your ad space. A lot of the smaller shows, maybe like an ESPN show, let's say a sports show or a lesser-known syndicated show might work it through barter. So my Tennessee station wants the G Gordon Liddy show and we get it because we guarantee that we're going to air X amount of national ads and that's the trade-off. So we get our little space, but we're guaranteeing that we're going to play the national commercials that sponsor that show. And then, there is no pay, it's barter. So you both just promising each other. You air this I'll air that. We're all happy, but for a show like Howard Stern, you gotta

Graham Brown: pay the special case, right?

Derrick Michaud: Yeah.

Graham Brown: Absolutely. When I look at podcasts and when we sort of consider the models there, we haven't really seen the maturation of that model yet. Have we, we've got on the one hand, have ad networks who are programmatic, which are sort of inserting ads based on the content on an automated basis. And then you have the networks like Spotify buying content, and then that becomes their advertising real estate. We don't have anything that is remotely like syndication yet. Or do we do anything? We can go into that model. Let's say, you have the Derek show and that's a big hit in Tennessee. And then you've got your local national advertisers on that, and you have this option now to take it into China, into the Mandarin-speaking market. And obviously, that's a huge opportunity for the local beer brands that you're working with. Those are the kind of opportunities that are out there. Have we seen anything like that yet? Is that possible? Or do we need a completely different model?

Derrick Michaud: I think it's happening now in the sense that I can post a podcast episode tomorrow, and someone in China could potentially listen to it tomorrow, or if they have access to either Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Pandora, if they can attach to any of those platforms that I'm syndicated in then they can ultimately capture them, they can listen to me. We're in radius indication, it's all airway. You can't have one station in New York and expect someone in Phoenix, Arizona to hear you unless you syndicate. So in a way, podcasting is already syndicated. And that's kind of the terminology. When you submit your podcast to the platforms, iTunes, Spotify, Google podcasts, while you're doing, as you're submitting for syndication, that's actually a somewhat normal term for that. Okay. That's great. I can throw up a podcast. Yeah. Someone in China or someone in Australia can listen to me. That's amazing, but they are never going to hear of me. So podcasting networks are sort of a hybrid of podcasting and radio in the sense that if you can be a part of a network, they have money to push you. They have that marketing budget to put you where you need to be in front of people in all the right areas. So people now understand like discovering who you are, listening to your show that way. I don't have any experience with working with a network, but that's usually what it means is you are backed. Now you can get in trouble too, in the sense that network might own your show. You might lose all intellectual property.

Graham Brown: I pay.

Derrick Michaud: Intellectual property and yeah, that's why some of these podcasts, the host will leave and they can't take the name with them. And that happens in radio too, or even like the late-night shows, when David Letterman had an iconic segment called the top 10 list, and for years he started on NBC. And then he later went to CBS. Well, it was a big negotiation for him to take that segment with him. NBC owned his top 10 list. He didn't own it. They owned it, even though it was his idea and his writer, did it for him and it was all them, NBC owned it. He ended up earning the rights to it and could take it with them. But that's the payoff sometimes, or the catch 22 to be in a network, they're going to push you. But they also own much like record labels and the music industry. They throw all this money on a band, but at the end of the day, the band doesn't own their own publishing. They don't own their music, their masters, nothing. So that's the trade or that bank can go independent and go on YouTube. And ultimately if they do it right on their own, yeah, they can get a million subscribers and they have all these audiences that they can go see and tour in different pockets of the world. But that's hard and not a lot of bands can do that, but they own everything. So there are some of these real independent artists that do manage to make it big, “make it big on their own”. That's the ultimate cause they own a hundred percent of their stuff where you have bands that still are in debt to their record labels after five albums.

Graham Brown: There's many shipwrecks out there. Isn't there? I was watching it on Netflix. There's a good documentary called the Lion's Share, which is about the Lion Sleeps Tonight''.

Derrick Michaud: Yeah.

Graham Brown: As an example, which originally came from another song called or we move away there's that, or we move that sort of backing acapella on it. That was originally recorded by this South African dude. In 1939 or something ridiculous like that. And he's on record. He was like in the, literally the first record, a recording studio in South Africa, he went in and did it recorded it on vinyl. It was just some like, a South African dude who was a manual laborer who could sing in churches and he recorded it and yet it got co-opted in the US and then, like lots of people released versions of it, like the lion sleeps tonight. And then obviously it went into Disney and Disney put it out in the Lion King and they made millions out of it and the whole, it's interesting. The whole documentary is about these journalists trying to tie Disney down and get the rights rightfully paid to the guy who wrote it. Who's dead now too. But his two daughters, it's incredible because they do actually reach a settlement at the end. But the complete irony of it is that they sue Disney to successfully sell our court for these rights. And then the lawyers that represented the family who had nothing got nothing from this, they just took all the winnings in fees, it was a really sad story. Yeah, they assign all the rights you see, it's a complete cluster. Fuck.

Derrick Michaud: That is, yeah. That's a tough story because that was theft in a way, that they used it and didn't think anyone would ever in a million years know that they took it from something. And then you have situations where people will steal a melody. Happens all the time now. You hear a song like this like, I'm Marvin Gaye lately has been getting hits and people ripping from Marvin Gaye and the artist is like, oh, I'm sorry, and then they just add Marvin Gaye on the publishing as a co-writer. So now the state's getting paid now, as he should be, or like his estate should be. A lot of artists are doing that now, instead of asking permission, they're just doing it and then we'll apologize after, and then they'll just add the name to the credits so they get some royalties. What a really wacky story, are you familiar with the Creedence clearwater revival?

Graham Brown: Oh Yeah.

Derrick Michaud: So John Fogarty was born in the Bayou for CCR. CCR disbands the record label and owns everything. All the masters, all the rights. Years later, George Forgety writes a song. I can't remember the name of it. And it has a similar vibe to being born in the Bayou. It's not a rip-off, but the record company that owned CCR music thought it was. And they sued him and they want, they sued him for a sort of maybe kind of ripping off his own song.

Graham Brown: Love it. You can see the lawyers for a good Christ across, right? I mean, you mentioned Jimmy Page a lot of that early Led Zep stuff is completely lifted from, there's an album that isn't there called like the blues origins of Led Zeppelin, which is just like Leadbelly and snap.

Derrick Michaud: If you look at the writing credits, now a lot of those old blues players and staff are now in there.

Graham Brown: Yeah. Finally, why now? I mean, a lot of that Led Zep stuff sounds exactly like some of those old songs like this amazing really, there's a really, there's a quiet, dark copyrighted story about there's a famous song from Australia called, Land down under, I don't know if any of the land down under it's quite a famous pop song, but it has this sort of flute roofing in it, which is called the cooker borrower riff. And he listened to it and it's the men that work. And it's, that song, he sort of hit in the eighties, remember those days absolutely massive global hit, but the kookaburra riff was lifted from a kids song. The thing is they didn't know it until somebody on some pop quiz on TV, they played the cooker bar song and they said, what does this sound like? And this was like 20 years after the single was published and somebody said on that panel show, oh, that sounds just like men at work down under. Well, it just so happens that the person who was connected to the estate of the crooked bar song was watching that TV show, contacted the lawyers and the lawyer said, we've got a case here. They then sued the guy from men at work down under, the rights, and they clean them out. But the dark thing was is the guy that flutist the flutist, the guy does that commit suicide because he was like completely ruined because he didn't own up to ripping that from the cooker bar. It was already a dark story, but he's still going. The guy that wrote Man down under. Oh, and then at work or yeah,

Derrick Michaud: They've cemented themselves in that eighties alternative, retro eighties, which I'm a big fan of that whole era, like tears for fears and all that stuff. Yeah.

Graham Brown: That's some great songwriters. I mean tears for fears. It was the, one of them wasn't that Roland, the, whatever the other guy was just a singer wasn't he? But he was a really good songwriter.

Derrick Michaud: I mean, the production level of that era of you call it the 80, the new wave, retro. We want to call it to production. You throw that music into a set of nice headphones. It's just remarkable how clean and well-mixed everything is. It's really nice. And this is all before approvals and any kind of digital editing. They had to really know the science of using a studio as an instrument and really making it sound great. The baseline for vanilla ice is

Derrick Michaud & Graham Brown: ice ice baby.

Derrick Michaud: That's like the most infamous that's crib. Yeah.

Graham Brown: Wow. I don't think anybody believed it was vanilla rice.

Derrick Michaud: Yeah.

Graham Brown: Yeah, man. It's good. It's a good chat. We went off and down that rabbit hole, but I can talk about music forever. I know you're complete like a music head so

Derrick Michaud: Yeah, I can talk about August forever.