Tony Garcia: Work Smarter, Sound Better, Make Money

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound off podcast, the show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
One of the most popular episodes we've ever done was with Sherry Lynch from 2017 where she tells a story of how they rescued the Bob and Sherry show from the grip of corporate radio nearly eight years later, the radio and digital startup now media is evolving quite nicely. Tony Garcia is Sherry's partner in now media and has a long track record of understanding syndication in North America. Listen, I can't tell you how many times I've had people come up to me and say, you know, I've got a great idea, and I think this should be on the radio, and we should totally get this syndicated. Well, it's a little more complicated than that, but when you've been doing it for as long as Tony has, you're gonna get a good sense for what will work and what won't. Tony's the expert when it comes to syndicated radio shows, platforms, partnerships and services. He owns global media services, which was founded in 2014 and as mentioned, co owns now media which launched in 2017 he leads the syndication of the Bob and Sherry show, which is America's leading AC morning show, heard on more than 70 stations. The show is more than FM. It's got stream content, original podcasts, book publishing, social media, and so much more. Tony also produces and syndicates other shows, like the popular morning show two guys named Chris. Tony's also been recognized as one of radio Inc top 20 leaders for 2024 and now Tony Garcia joins me from Castle Rock, Colorado, Tony, back when you were entering the 1980s you were doing radio. What was exciting about radio going into the 1980s

Tony Garcia  1:52  
everything was exciting about radio in the 1980s and you're younger, and you have the enthusiasm of youth, right? So you're like, Wow, this is great. But you know, one of the things that I remember, I was an intern at WNBC in New York, and one of the things I remember being an intern there was box upon box of bumper stickers coming in. They must have ordered. It had to be a million, or to me, it looked like a million. I don't know how many they ordered, but they did this bumper sticker campaign, and they gave us interns these little envelopes. So if we spotted somebody on the road with a bumper sticker, we would hand them this envelope, and it would tell them times that they would be asking people to call in, and you'd have to have the bumper sticker to qualify. That was the qualification mechanism that was pretty exciting to just see the offices just box after box after box of bumper stickers. That was kind of cool, and that was kind of exciting. It was fun. We don't see a lot of that these days.

Matt Cundill  2:47  
How did you get into WNBC in the first place?

Tony Garcia  2:50  
So did I read it NYU? And we had a little NYU mafia. We took over the radio station and changed it from a station that was playing album rock to a station that was playing what, in those days, was called New Wave, and there was a handful of us. One of the guys who was the general manager of the station was very sales focused, and he pitched himself to be a salesperson while he was still in college at WNBC. And so they were like, yeah, some kid. So they basically gave him overnights to sell, and he brought four or five of us in as interns, some in the programming department, some in the sales department, one of the assistant program directors, a guy named buzz brindle, was one of the professors at NYU. So there was a, really, in those days, a real tight connection between NYU and WNBC. That's how we ended up there. So

Matt Cundill  3:44  
I used to listen to WNBC only at night I was in Montreal, and 66 would come up clear as a bell, yeah, yeah, we'd

Tony Garcia  3:52  
blast up there. That was fun.

Matt Cundill  3:54  
I love the music. I love the songs. It was great to hear what New York was listening

Tony Garcia  3:58  
to. It was great. You know, Don Imus is the reason I got into radio, because I wanted to be the next Don Imus. I failed miserably at becoming the next Don Imus, but I did, you know, it gave me the love, the love of radio, that I had, and still have.

Matt Cundill  4:12  
And it was exciting in 1980 with new wave. Oh, my God, it was you had a show called wave breaker,

Tony Garcia  4:20  
I did. And so sometimes you don't know what you don't know, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I think as you get older, you start building barriers. So in 1980 I didn't know what I didn't know. And so we were kidding around. Me and a couple of friends, we're like, what would happen if Casey Kasem were hosting a show that had some of this punk alternative stuff. So my buddy had a pretty good voice, and he was like, it's the Dead Kennedys with holiday in Cambodia. And the countdown continues, you know? So we're having a couple beers, as you do when you're in college. And I was 19 years old at the time, and we. Said, Holy shit, let's do a countdown. And so we pitched the program director, and I'm going to give him a shout out right now. His name is Sal liccardo, and he went on to program VH one, and now works for NPR, and he gave us a time slot, and we put together a countdown. I called the nightclubs around New York. I'm like, What are you guys playing? What are people dancing to? We put together a top 10 countdown, and again, without knowing we're like, Hey, this is pretty good. Maybe we can syndicate this. And so I wrote a press release, and I sent it around to the radio trades, and by just sheer luck, a writer at Billboard magazine was a listener to wnyu, and so he did a feature story about wnyu and this wave breaker show, and we started getting calls from college radio stations going, Hey, we want your show. And so we had to learn how to be a syndication company. We started by getting these tapes that we'd get, like the Methodist hour and stuff. We'd bulk erase them, and then we'd put the show on those tapes and send them out again. You don't know what you don't know. What we didn't know at the time was that a lot of the music that we're playing, a lot of the artists that are played now in classic hits, the Human League, and some of those other groups, Spandau Ballet, soft sell, soft sell. They didn't have us record label contracts. So in New York, you were able to get the records as imports, but in a lot of cities and a lot of college towns, you couldn't. So a lot of college stations took our show because they couldn't get those records, not necessarily because the gal Dow was so fantastic, but they couldn't get those records. But ultimately, we had about 80 college radio stations around the US carrying the show. We expanded to two hours. We sold some sponsors in it, and literally, I learned the business by doing the business. I haven't looked back. So

Matt Cundill  6:48  
I did have this down. How did you distribute this? But I think you answered it by taking all those religious tapes and bulk erasing and

Tony Garcia  6:55  
sending them out. Listen, necessity is the mother of invention. So we had started there. We had gotten a sponsorship from maxelle tape, and they gave us the tape to master the show on, because we're talking about real three. This is way before digital is real, is real. So we mastered the show on max cell tape, and we gave them production credit for it. Couldn't do a spot, because it's college radio, and through some connection, and I really don't remember what the connection was. There was a company called Bonneville music. Bonneville still exists, owns radio station, but they had a division called Bonneville beautiful music, and they did the instrumental background music that so many stations ran in the 70s, 80s. FM good music stations, well, because they were worried about the quality of their music when they would send a tape to a radio station, and they'd send them on these big, 10 inch reels they only got used once, and then the tape came back to New Jersey, to Bonneville, and they had all these reels of tape that had only been used once. And so we bought them for $1 a piece, and we'd go with my buddy's family wagon, literally hit an old Volvo wagon. And we got the Volvo wagon, pile it up with all these Bonneville beautiful music tapes, and then we'd pack them up and ship them to the stations, ask the stations to send them back to us, and we would erase them later on, we got a sponsorship with techniques, the division of Panasonic, and they gave us reel to reel machines. And we ganged four reel to reels machines together so that we could high speed duplicate the show at my friend's in my friend's basement in New Jersey.

Matt Cundill  8:27  
And now you're hooked on syndication. You understand it, and it grows because, you know, as you progress through the 80s, there's a whole bunch of interesting companies and that you're working for, like, I think you went to progressive radio network. What happened right after college Christopher EU network is a

Tony Garcia  8:43  
really, was a really interesting company, and I learned a lot there. I worked for a guy named Bill Quinn, and the company was syndicating a show called the news blimp, which was designed, and you'll appreciate this met. It was designed because in those days there was a news requirement for radio stations. This was before the FCC deregulated US radio, so they had a news requirement. And so these news blimps would take a news story and then pepper the news story with thematic hooks from rock music. So the story would be, there was a big drug bust in Florida, and 5050, cases of marijuana, or 50 kilos of marijuana, were seized. And then you'd hear a Brownsville station smoking in the boys room. And then the story would continue. And then there would be another clip, and they were about three minutes long, which is really long by today's standards, by PPM standards, but they were about three minutes long, but they covered the news requirement that music stations had in those days. And so at that point, when I got there, all the big progressive AOR stations around the country were carrying with some amazing call letters on the affiliate list. But as things, you know, as things progressed and we ended up shortening the length of the shows and stuff, but it was a really good experience there, because I was allowed. My boss, Bill Quinn, was allowed me to do everything. I did collections, because we showed sold the shows for cash. We did do a little bit of barter, but I did collections, I did billing, I did affiliate sales, so that the only thing I didn't do was edit tape. So it was a great learning experience for somebody who was in their, you know, early 20s. I'm always

Matt Cundill  10:19  
fascinated by the tech. We've talked a little bit about sending it out via tape. I seem to recall getting at 40 on vinyl, I think at one point when I was a ckgm. But around this time, satellite is also beginning to pop up. So did you have a preferred method? Yeah, well, I

Tony Garcia  10:35  
mean, it just in those days, satellite was expensive and it was challenging, and it wasn't till you know, RKO was the first network to be all satellite, right? And I spent some time after progressive. I spent some time at the Wall Street Journal report, and was there when we converted. What we did in the early days is the Wall Street Journal fed out on satellite. The downlinks were generally at newspapers, because we piggybacked on the Associated Press's satellite, and then RKO sort of led the way with a satellite that was called SATCOM 1r and we moved the Wall Street Journal reports and the Dow Jones reports to SATCOM 1r and in that that's when every station started to have their own satellite dish, their own receivers and whatnot like that. And that made, you know, that made a difference. But still, vinyl was the standard for short form programming, anything that wasn't news driven or live driven, the distribution was entirely on disk. Some of the smaller companies did tape, but disk was more convenient, and it wasn't until 19 early 1990s that we cut over from vinyl to compact discs

Matt Cundill  11:40  
for anyone who was in radio back in the 80s, or even if you were just listening, you knew and recognized the sales battle between newspaper and radio. Radio had red hot because it works. And you know, newspapers would put an ad in saying in one ear and out the other. It was, it was quite the thing that you went to Wall Street Journal, which, that's a newspaper, but it has an audio component to it, right?

Tony Garcia  12:07  
And I think one of the things that Dow Jones did brilliantly, and other companies do too, but my experience was Dow Jones was their ability to expand horizontally, so they had business news. So what can we do with business news? Right? They The Wall Street Journal, and they had Barron's Magazine, that Investor magazine on the weekends. So what could you know? What can we do to expand horizontally so they had the journal, they had the news service, they had Barron's. They even had a weekend service called Barron's on investment, which we're just like a little teletype machine that would print out a dozen or so stories for the weekend so that a news an all news station, or a news talk station, could have a business report on the weekend when the markets were closed. So they were really good at that horizontal expansion. Or what we would say the 2024 term would be repurposing. They repurposed that content into other media to expand their footprint and expand the business make, made a lot of sense. By the

Matt Cundill  13:07  
way, I would be remiss if I didn't say that every Sunday night my dad would stop at the convenience store and pick up a Baron's magazine because he worked as a stockbroker and needed to feel ready for Monday. Yeah, lot of folks did that. You spent, like, your entire 80s in New York City, which was the pinnacle of radio, I think, for anyone who's knows the z1 100 story, there's now a documentary out about it. What was it like working in New York? I know you're doing syndication, and you've got a very big picture look at radio in the country, but you get to be in and amongst New York at the same time. So what was radio like, and being surrounded by it in the 80s,

Tony Garcia  13:46  
New York was exciting because, you know, these guys were still these sort of Legends. Were still working, Howard Stern, Don Imus, and some of these real legends of the business, they were on the air, right? And then the z1 100 thing, and Scott Shannon in the mid 80s, it was such an exciting time. No matter where you listened, there was stuff to listen to. There was exciting, new, innovative stuff to listen to, and it was great. And there was a camaraderie in the marketplace, where there were a couple of bars, because the buildings were fairly close to each other, right? So you know, CBS Blackrock was on 57th Street and ABC was on 54th Street, and NBC was east of that at Radio City at 50th street. So there were a couple of bars where the media guys would just hang out. So you'd see people from the different networks, and you'd see people from the different radio stations hanging out and tossing back a couple a couple drinks. It was fun.

Matt Cundill  14:43  
The 1990s start to come around early on. And yes, there's satellite distribution that becomes a little bit more prevalent. But you know, what did the early 90s bring to syndication?

Tony Garcia  14:55  
I think a couple of things. I think the the idea of barter really. Really expanded, and it allowed some smaller companies to get involved in it. The other thing satellite was, in those days, really cost prohibitive. I don't deal with it now, so honestly, man, I don't know what it costs now, but in those days, it was probably you'd have to commit maybe 100 or 150 grand a year just to be connected, right? Right? Not to mention, are you providing satellite receivers, etc, etc. So that was a barrier to entry that, by today's standards, doesn't really exist. And so we felt like, you know, in the, what I would call the specials areas, right? The programs, the weekend specials and stuff like that, vinyl was still the way to go until the early 90s. So it was early, early 91 actually, late 1990 I was at a company called UniStar, and had left New York. I was in Colorado Springs. It by then, and we made the decision to cut away from vinyl and go to CDs for a number of reasons, reason number one being the expense, because you're sending somebody a five hour show, you're sending them 512 inch albums, and then you've got a box that it's in, and then you've got an outer box, right? And in the summer, the male guy would park in the sun, and this the album would warp, and then you said Xing, a replacement copy to the affiliate. And so CDs changed all that. So we cut over. I want to say it was late 1990 maybe early 1991 we cut over all the shows at UniStar. We had about 23 weekly specials. We cut them all over to CD, and really reduced the cost of distribution. There were a few laggards, you know, even then, there were a few laggards that didn't have, they didn't have CD players. Or there were some, you know, there were some folks who were still married to carts and were recording things, you know, all the recording songs into carts and that and such. But we, you know, we cut over in CDs was CDs was the way to go, until just recently, where now FTP delivery is almost zero cost now, and so again, the barrier to entry keeps going down. So now, frankly, all you need is a Google account and you can start distributing programming.

Matt Cundill  17:18  
Yeah, actually, the biggest expense now, I think, with syndication is the person who has to transfer it from FTP or whatever it's delivered to into the radio station ecosystem,

Tony Garcia  17:29  
absolutely and actually, there's some ways that you can automate that we have a number of stations that receive the Bob and cherry show and just schedule and map the individual segments that we send each day into a cart. They don't touch it. It just goes seamlessly, goes right in. There's not even a person involved in that anymore. So when we talk about how we did this in the 1980s it sounds primitive, because we've so many advances.

Matt Cundill  17:55  
That was my first job. My first job was operating those tapes, whether it was a religious tape or syndicated programming, you get to be on the air two hours in small town, Nova Scotia, between six and eight in the morning, and then you're going to run countdown tapes. And I thought that was the greatest job ever.

Tony Garcia  18:18  
Of course you did because you were behind the mic, you were on the

Matt Cundill  18:21  
air, baby, two hours on a Sunday morning.

Tony Garcia  18:24  
I think we all felt that way. I was a summer intern at the station my mom listened to on Long Island station called wgli, which no longer exists, and I was a summer intern, and there was a couple of days where I got to be on the air, and it was a block programmed radio station. So the in the morning drive, they played a little adult contemporary music and told the wives when their husbands would be home, whether the trains from New York were on time or not. They told the clamors in in the Great South Bay how high the waves were going to be. And then played a little bit of Elton, John and Barbra Streisand. And then in the middle of the day, they did some talk box. And so the first time I was behind the mic at this radio station, I did a show called ask your neighbor, and I remember really well that this woman called up, and here I am. I'm 19 years old, and she's asking me if I have a good recipe for stuffed peppers. And I'm like, I don't know, Sally, is there a good recipe for stuffed peppers? Let's find out if our listeners know 5701290, and we'll go to a commercial. We'll find out. And then I got a cookbook, you know, and I'm flipping through this cookbook trying to find stuffed pepper recipes. It was a hoot. It was a hoot, but I was on the air, damn it. I was on the air.

Matt Cundill  19:35  
I would like to point out that you probably don't remember half the passwords it takes to get into anything, but you remember the phone number,

Tony Garcia  19:42  
right? These are the things that stick with you. There was a there was a whole thread on Facebook the other day. Do you remember your home phone number from when you were a kid? And I do

Matt Cundill  19:51  
mid 90s. You go to greater media in Charlotte. Is this your first meeting with Bob and Sherry? Just when you meet them for the first time? Yeah. So,

Tony Garcia  20:00  
yeah, so quick story about that. When I was at United stations, I had developed a relationship with two gentlemen who were based here in Denver at the the then Jefferson pilot stations, Bob call and Rick Jackson. And Rick and I developed a really, a really nice, close relationship of and a friendship over a couple of years. And Bob as by the way, they're still friends of mine. And one of the things that Jefferson pilot was really good about doing was promoting programming people into the general manager's seat. Bob call ultimately became the general manager of the Denver cluster. Don Benson came out of programming with nationwide, ended up being the president of the company at one point. And so Rick had been transferred to Charlotte, and I ran into him at a conference, and I you asked me what I was doing, and I told him that I was unhappy with the company that I was working for because it was more media buying than syndication, and I preferred to be in the syndication business. And I had put together a business plan, and I wanted to create a boutique syndication company. And I said to Rick, you know, this is probably not something Jefferson pilot would do, but take a look at it. Let me you know, what do you know? What do you think of the business plan? So I called him a couple weeks later, and he said, Have you ever heard of Bob and Sherry? And I'm like, Bob, No, I've never heard of Bob and Sherry. And he's like, I'll send you some stuff. So he'd send me some tapes. He sent me a best of CD that they had done, and I listened to the show. And there were two things that jumped out at me. Number one was that it was a show from Charlotte that didn't sound like it was from Charlotte. And, you know, we in radio are so sensitive to accents. And then the second part of it was that I'd never heard anybody like Sherry Lynch. I had never heard a woman who was kicking her partner's ass. It was just, you know, we were, I was so used to that sort of Don Imus template where he's surrounded by guys, and if there's a woman's voice, she's the traffic person. And even with the morning zoos, the guy Zookeeper, whatever you want to call him, the ringmaster, is the guy. And then there's people contributing, and maybe there's some women and maybe there's some men, but there wasn't a woman who was blunt and really blunt and totally like it was. And so I thought it was really interesting. And so my my interview was with the entire management team, Bob Sherry, their om, their PD Don Benson, who was the head of programming at the time, Clark Brown, who was the president of the communications group, Rick Jackson and me. What I didn't know is that Sherry had just had braces put on her teeth and had been to the orthodontist to have them tightened, and so she was kind of talking like this in between her teeth, and was sitting next to me and was literally smooshing her food in the plate. And she's like, we're really excited about being syndicated. And despite that, you know, I took the job, one of the things that Clark Brown had asked me was, Hey, Tony, if you get this job, you're going to call Mel carmazen at CBS. I'm like, no. He's like, What do you mean? No. I said, No, I'm going to build this show in small and medium markets where we can have a personal relationship with the owners and the managers of those radio stations. And so that's what we did. But we felt, I felt that money is money, and that dollar from Valdosta, Georgia is as valuable as that dollar is from New York City. And in those days, we did not do barter. In those days, Bob and cherry was available only for cash, and that's where, that's the way we built the company, and we built the business from the ground up that way, and it worked out well. That first few years worked out really well. Once consolidation took hold, then it became a little bit more challenging, because there were companies who preferred only to take programming that was built within their own company.

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Matt Cundill  24:09  
Are you managing the project? Are you managing the syndication of the show? Or are you managing talent? Or is it all of it? When you're thinking, I'm going to put this into many smaller markets, rather than swinging for the fence, landing it in New York and then being under the microscope constantly for six months? Well,

Tony Garcia  24:28  
a couple ways, I'm gonna answer that question. So the sort of, there's not always been a rule of thumb and syndication that you can go down, but you can't go up. And I think that that's been proven out more times than not, where you can go down, but you can't go up in market size. So even before I got to Jefferson pilot, when we were doing a special, we were doing a Beach Boys special on a weekend, we would go to New York, LA, maybe Boston, and work with that station and use one of their people as the host. So when we went out and marketed the show, we would say, hey, it's so and so from the oldie Station. In Boston or so and so from WCBS FM in New York. So there was always sort of that mentality, you know, to it. And in those days, Charlotte was market 25 or 26 it's a little bit bigger now. And so it made sense to work down rather than work up. And so that's what we you know, that's what we ultimately ended up

Matt Cundill  25:20  
doing. I love it. What were some of the benchmarks to the growth of syndicating Bob and Sherry? There

Tony Garcia  25:26  
are some really interesting benchmarks. So, you know, I think the first two years, we got fired by more affiliates than I cleared. The show was a lot edgier in those days, but everything was edgier. We're talking about friends and Will and Grace. Kind of era where TV was pushing the envelope. Howard Stern was still in terrestrial and everybody's sort of pushing the envelope, right? So Clinton was present. So it was a different world from a content standpoint, I think. And so the show was edgy. And so the first couple of years, I had to get people, I had to shake people up a little bit and say, Look, I know the show is called Bob and cherry, and it sounds like two really nice people, and by the way, they are two really nice people, but you're gonna hear a little bit of language. You're gonna hear listeners calling in about situations including infidelity, including public nudity. And I would literally say to the prospects, listen, if you've got a problem with hearing the words bitch, bastard, penis or vagina or bite me on the show. We don't do it all the time, but you're going to hear it from time to time, and you got to be prepared for that. If you can't, if you can't handle that, we shouldn't do this deal. And so I think for a lot of the broadcasters, they were like, Oh, how bad could it be? And again, we're dealing with smaller markets, and they were getting a lot of pushback. I think one of the great stories is Bangor Maine stations up there that were owned by a woman named Martha dudman. It was great, late published author, and she put us on their AC station, and we went on and first couple days, I'm checking in with her, and she's like, I'm getting killed. It's terrible. They hate it. I'm like, just give it time. Just give it time. Couple weeks go by and we're together at an NAB, and we're having dinner. Rick Jackson and I are having dinner with Martha, and she's like, I don't know, guys, I just I may have to jump off the ledge on this. This is just terrible. She'd had the show maybe a month. And I'm like, Look, just give it time. Rick and I are both like, look, give it time. It's going to be okay. And so we leave the convention and next week call. I better call her and see what the hell's going on. We only had like, two or three affiliates, so I'm calling and she's not taking my call. And I'm calling and she's not taking my this is before voicemail. Call and leave a message, call and leave a message. It's about two and a half weeks later, and she picks up the phone. She's like, Tony, and I'm like, yeah. She's like, somebody liked it. I was like, almost, greatest words I ever heard, really, someone liked it. She said, Yeah, somebody called and said they thought they were funny. So that was in, like, September, October. One of the things we had promised her was that we would do an appearance that spring. So the following spring comes along, and we're going to Bangor, and we get caught in traffic, Bob and Jerry and I get caught I'm driving bum jury, and I get caught in traffic. We're supposed to be at this hotel at 5pm we get there at about 525 maybe 530 and there's Martha, and she's pacing in front of the hotel, and she's white. And I pull up, and I open the window, and I'm like, Hey, Martha. And she's like, people have been here since three o'clock this afternoon, and we walked into this ballroom full of people, and Bob and Sherry walked in. This roar goes up. I just got goosebumps telling you that story. It was an amazing story. We are still on in Bangor Maine. In fact, we were up there last month, visiting with listeners. So we had a couple of bumps, but that was one of the benchmarks. The other benchmark was we had put together a deal with an affiliate in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which was sort of in the backyard of Charlotte. And that station exploded ratings wise. Another one was Q 107 in Columbus, Georgia, another one where everybody hated the show, until no one hated the show. And we, we met 1000 people on our first visit there. I counted them as a little north of 1000 and the show just sort of skyrocketed to the top once we had that weight ratings results, and once they were the results from a Bangor and from Columbus, Georgia, then all of a sudden, I had the proof, right? I had the proof that I wasn't crazy and that the show would really work. And so we went from two affiliates to six affiliates, to 15 affiliates to 60 affiliates in a period of about three years.

Matt Cundill  29:37  
That's incredible. Attitude Era, 1997, 98 also combined with the fact that here's a woman who's on and I know Bob's there too, but you know, when a man says it, it's not nearly, it doesn't nearly garner the reaction once you hear a woman telling the truth about this,

Tony Garcia  29:54  
I think that what ends up happening, she created a template that others were to follow. You. Many others were to follow, and there's a long list of them, you know, I think that's part of sort of what's happened there. Remember that show is the first in syndication. There was no AC syndicated AC Show, and there was no syndicated AC show with a female lead in those days. So it was new, and it was different than I think there was a lot of skepticism, and fairly so skepticism about the show, did you stay with Bob and Sherry? Yeah, was Jefferson file, Lincoln, financial, greater media. And then things got a little weird. I mean, there's the recession and all that. And so I came out here to run a company called regional Help Wanted in 2010 it was a network of localized employment websites throughout North America, US and Canada. In Canada would have been called Job shop.ca, long name, amazing results. And I ran that from 2010 till 2014 we made it through the recession, and then private equity sold the business. And like what happens with most people, lot of us got cut. So went back to the roots, right? I went back to the syndication roots, and I hung out the shingle. In 2016 got back together with Bob and Sherry, and in 2017 we took the company internally. We purchased it from Odyssey. It was called intercom in those days. So

Matt Cundill  31:16  
in 2014 after you let go from regional helpwana.com you formed global media services and started to provide services to radio stations. And this has been documented on this podcast before, back in 2017 which was actually the first time I met you and Sherry, you guys had just launched it. So you spend three years with Global Media Services, and you come up with a number of things that radio really needs. You know, we're coming out of our session. There's a lot of layoffs, there's a lot of change going on in the industry. So like radio spot shop is one thing

Tony Garcia  31:49  
I saw that there was a need out there for smaller like really small market stations who needed voices. They needed a female voice. They needed different male voices. Because one of the challenges when you're in a really small market is the same voice in every spot, and it becomes difficult to not have everything of the sort of sameness. And so we developed radio spot shop to have a stable of voices. And then, right now, we've got, I think, eight or nine voices, half male, half female, that are available radio stations send us a script. We record that script, and then we can give it to them as a raw voice return, or we can give it to them as a produced piece, and we do it at a really reasonable price, so that these stations can, you know, afford to do it.

Matt Cundill  32:31  
And you get to 2017, and Bob and Sherry, I think, is a show that, I mean, they're tired of being bought and sold and inside these ecosystems of radio stations where, and I love this story where she says, we're gonna have fun all the time, and it's gonna be fun, fun, fun, and nobody's having any fun at the radio station because of you know, whatever's going on. How do the two of you come up with the idea to buy the show out of Odyssey and just bring it in house, as well as all the assets, the digital and the IP and all that

Tony Garcia  32:59  
stuff. So Bob and she had come to me and said, you know, this isn't going to be long for you, because we're going to hang it up. Because they'd had 17 different program directors, they'd had five or six general managers that have had many ownership changes. And I said, Well, why don't we do sort of a leveraged buyout and make a deal with intercom that is beneficial to them, but also beneficial to us. You know, a lot of radio companies don't want to be in the syndication business because it's a different it's the same kitchen, but it's a different recipe. And so the idea was, let's take some of that off of them. Let's let them continue to have the show. Let's let them continue to sell the show locally. But why don't we take over the syndication piece of it. So we structured a deal in such a way so that they got the benefits of not having to pay a salary, not having to pay the benefits and all that stuff that goes with the crew of the show. And in exchange for them saving that money, they gave us the IP, the URL, all all the archival material, the logo of images, and all of that stuff going back to day one, plus the receivables for the syndication network. So, you know, to do that over again? I think it'd be a great deal. I don't know that intercom would do that all over again. They were embroiled in the merger with CBS radio at the time, and I think that this was such a small potatoes kind of thing that they just were like, Yeah, whatever. Just, whatever.

Matt Cundill  34:26  
Yeah. You know, it's really odd when you get into a negotiation, someone's going to win, someone's going to lose, but the fact that you got the back catalog, and, you know, some of the IP and some of the stuff that you could license or relicense out to other radio stations. I mean, that's, that's where the fun is. But a lot of companies just don't see the value. Sometimes, when they're sitting down making this negotiation,

Tony Garcia  34:48  
no, I think that. They don't, I think that. And I would say there's, I think, a mistake that a lot of talent make, is they don't own their stuff. And when I talk to talent and do any, you know, little consulting and stuff on the side to say, you own your stuff. Own your stuff, because they'll put a contract in front of you, and they'll own everything, and even if your name is Joe Smith, you'll lose the right to call your show the Joe Smith show, which is challenging if you want to go somewhere else and your name is Joe Smith. So, you know, I always caution people about that, and I think for us, I think it was a fair deal, honestly, Matt, I think it was a fair deal. I think that they got what they wanted, which was a reduction, a significant reduction in their overhead, and we got what we wanted, which was the opportunity to chart our own path. It

Matt Cundill  35:31  
was definitely a fair deal. I mean, sometimes they say, Well, I wish we would have kept that. And I say they I'm really just talking about from the big company perspective, because even here in Canada, the CBC has overlooked certain aspects, and I'll mention, under the influence with Terry O'Reilly, they didn't really think much of it as a podcast property. And we'll just kind of let it go. And no, we don't really need that, but they're overlooking things are not going to be bothering with anyway. But I think the thing, my big takeaway, and it goes right back to when we first met, is the digital aspect. And I don't know how you weren't sweating bullet. I mean, I know you sweat bullets, but at the beginning, you know, when you're thinking, we have all this digital opportunity, and we have to do it for many stations, and how are we going to do that without getting swamped and overwhelmed and crashing the boat?

Tony Garcia  36:20  
Well, the only thing that didn't happen was the crashing of the boat, but we were swamped and overwhelmed when we met you. We were like our heads were spinning, literally, our heads were spinning because there were all these things that we didn't know. We didn't know right about putting together the business. So the very first full time hire was a young lady that you interviewed a couple couple months ago, Heather Furr, because we knew we had to have a digital presence. And you do have to know your limitations, and you do have to hire people who are smarter than you in certain areas. And Heather is smarter than me, and she's smarter than Sherry, and when it comes to digital she's a digital native. She managed the websites for intercom in Charlotte, and we were lucky to bring her over. She really understands the digital aspect of these things, and I don't know how we would have managed it without her.

Matt Cundill  37:07  
I know you've got a few other properties. So there's a show

Tony Garcia  37:10  
that I work on called two guys named Chris. It's based in Greensboro, North Carolina, and it's for classic rock rock stations. And it's a fantastic show. It's like one of the best kept secrets out there. It's a two Guy Show, and they literally are both named Chris, and it's Chris Kelly and Chris dem, a very I'm going to call it an accessible show. You know, with a lot of a lot of shows, and particularly in rock, you have to learn the characters. You have to learn the lingo and the the euphemisms for certain things that these shows do. And I think one of the cool things about two guys and Chris is you can listen today and get it. There is no lingo. There's no nothing. It's not political. The show is a lot of fun. They do a lot of contesting. Chris dem has an encyclopedic knowledge of music, and one of their benchmarks is a quiz that they do with the listeners, and the listener needs to beat Chris DEM. And the listeners rarely beat Chris stem. It's called put up or shut up. And the prize is, you know, it's whatever they got. It's a ball cap, it's $55 it's whatever. So we're not talking about big, grand prizes, but it's a lot of fun, and it's not prepped. Chris stem literally leaves the studio and the listener gives the answers, and then Chris dem comes back in and he gives his answers that having been there and seen it live, it's not it's not at all staged or prepped. So it's kind of cool. It's a good show. It's a really good show.

Matt Cundill  38:35  
I've not heard the show, but I heard them on another podcast where they talked about their show, and I understood the chemistry and the show just from listening to the two of them appearing on a podcast. And it was pretty obvious that they get along, and they understand who's going to be doing what at one point, who's making the next move, and they know, they know where the puck's going and how to get it in the

Tony Garcia  38:55  
net, yeah. And they're great planners. I think that's one of the things that is really one of their strengths, because they're really great planners, and then once they make that plan, they execute that plan really well, because you need both sides of it, right? You need the planning and you need the execution.

Matt Cundill  39:08  
There are a number of really, really good radio shows that are just inactive right now. It's just the way the business seems to be going. What advice do you have for a team of two, maybe three, people who want to keep the show going, but they just don't see the opportunity in radio, but they want to take it independent, much the same way Bob and Sherry did.

Tony Garcia  39:30  
I think there is opportunity, but it won't be easy. And yeah, I guess you could argue that nothing that's worth it is is easy, but you have to cultivate that. I think one of the things that is really important is that the talent cultivates that audience and understands that audience before they get cut, and that they own that audience to the degree that they can before that, and then they have to do something that some talent is not really good at, which is shamelessly self promotion. Out. You have to shamelessly self if you're going to go digital, you have to shamelessly self promote that show, because you no longer have the megaphone of broadcasts to tell people, Oh, we got a podcast, or we got this, or go buy a t shirt. You've got to get those folks through social through, frankly, if the money is there, through display ads. Go buy a billboard, go buy a bus ad. Know that stuff, no more of the research. Know if you're on the air right now and you have a rate and you're on a radio station, know what the hot zips are? Because if your show goes away and you need to pitch those people, and you know what your hot zips are, you can now take your marketing campaign and you can focus it on that whatever number of hot zips that have a high concentration of listeners and be more efficient with your ad spend.

Matt Cundill  40:49  
You were the vice chair of the Conclave Learning Conference for a number of years, way back in the 2000s I had a chance to connect with it in the mid 10s, right up until 2019 and there hasn't really been one since, but there hasn't been a lot of radio conferences. Most of them have changed or gone away. Why is that and what are we missing by not getting together more?

Tony Garcia  41:08  
Well, I think we're missing camaraderie, right off the bat. I think we're missing the camaraderie, the fellowship and the exchange of ideas. Not every exchange of ideas takes place at a panel, the exchange of ideas takes place the bar exchange of ideas takes place in the hallway, in the elevator, wherever. So I think by doing that, we're not cross pollinating in the business enough. So I think that's that's a challenge. I think you know, the realities, the financial realities, whether it's the Conclave or any of these other organizations, are as stations have fewer employees, it's harder to take time off, and as radio companies have fewer resources, it's harder for companies to reimburse people to go to these things. And you know, as we all know, travel isn't cheap, so in the specific case of the Conclave, as record labels and their resources were capped due to financial restrictions inside the labels, but also due to the changing view of what is payola, that money wasn't there. So these resources have dried up and again, going to a conclave, going to an NAB, you know, you're going to come out of pocket today, probably coming out of pocket 1500 bucks. So for a lot of people, that's a that's a significant that's a house payment. For a lot of people, so it's a challenge to go to these things, so you end up making the decision to not go. And so the conferences shrink, and now there's less conferences. I

Matt Cundill  42:36  
was going to ask you to talk about the podcast opportunity for radio, but instead, I've changed my mind, and I've set something else up on the fly here, and that was a comment that Adam curry made a few days ago on the new media show. So Adam curry, former MTV VJ, the podfather, you know, one of the very first to get podcasting underway, but he had a comment about podcasting and the future, and I'm going to play you the clip, and I'll ask you to comment right after

Adam Curry  43:03  
what I feel right now is the big opportunity, which I'm actually working on myself, local markets. They've been completely ignored by radio even z1 100 in New York, where I worked for many years. You know, it's Elvis Duran in the morning, but he's in 15 markets. And, yeah, you'll hear a, you know, a localized z1 100 New York jingle. But that doesn't mean that he's really he's doing, he has to do more generalized stuff. Well, I mean, New York does still have some New York newspapers, but even they cater more now towards the entire country or the entire world, like the New York Post and The New York Times certainly is really no longer a local New York newspaper. Facebook has sucked up all the local advertising from any type of publication in any local market. So I feel that at this point, there's a tremendous opportunity to create podcasts based upon very hyper local geographical location. In fact, I'm going to be doing one for Fredericksburg right here's 11 and a half 1000 people. There's a lot of interesting people here. There's certainly a lot of money in Fredericksburg. And we have one newspaper that comes out once a week, and it's very politically slanted, and people, they have no local voice. It's such an obvious hole in the market. You could turn a 747, around in it, and that's globally. That's what radio used to do. Radio was local. You know, that's the opportunity I see. And I'm pretty sure that that's going to happen. That I think we'll see in the next couple years, we'll see many hyper localized podcasts that will be thriving because local communities will support it. Nothing is new. It's all been done before. It's just a cycle, and we're coming around. I think

Tony Garcia  44:49  
he's right. He's got a point. I don't know if you're familiar with a guy named Ed Ryan. So Ed Ryan was one of the editors of radio. Inc, you're nodding, and you know, Ed started. Ed lives in Fort Myers. This, and he started something called beach talk radio, and then he quit his job at Radio, Inc, because he's doing so well with it. So I think there's two ways to look at this, right? I think that if you can build a community, whether that community is a geographic community, like Fort Myers, or if that community is a community of like minded people in whatever vein, right? Like minded people, because we all like fishing, like minded people, because we all have a political view, then I think you've got an opportunity. I think you've got a real opportunity. And I think that you know, and you've been to the conferences like I have met, and you see these podcasts, and they got a badge on and it says something like, duck call weekly, and you go on duck call weekly for crime, but that's a community, right? That's a community of folks who are into duck calls or whatever it is. So yeah, I think that's the better opportunity than to sort of just be a generalist. Because if you're going to be a generalist, you better be a celebrity. Because, as you and I have talked before, discovery is the biggest problem in podcasting. So if you're just another show, and it's a challenge we have as well. By the way, if you're just another show among the 2 million podcasts that are out there, how

Matt Cundill  46:08  
you gonna get found is discovery becoming a problem for radio? So we launch a new radio show, a new morning show, a new afternoon drive show, and discovery feels like it's a problem,

Tony Garcia  46:20  
unequivocally, because the days of the billboards and the bus boards and buying 300 points against a demographic to promote a radio station are over, and so, yeah, I think it's really tough, especially outside the footprints. They're growing the QM audience. They're taking P threes and making them p twos, making them p ones. I think that's a real challenge, because we don't have the marketing dollars to do that anymore.

Matt Cundill  46:41  
So if I'm an independent FM radio owner, it could be medium sized market. I feel like my radio station could be marketing my digital my digital should be. I mean, what do I do with this stick now,

Tony Garcia  46:52  
everything, I think that you have to be super creative. I think it's going to depend on the market, but I think you have to be super creative. What's the hole somebody said the other day, what's the hole in the donut? So what's the hole? Do you have a newspaper that's only once a week now? Well, maybe you can do a news website. Is no one covering high school sports? Get somebody out there to cover high school sports. I don't care if it's another kid that cover the high school sports. So I think there's some things that you can do, but you have to be strategic about it, right? You have to look around and go, Okay, what's the opportunity? You know, are you a college town then flip the format on the weekend and do an alternative weekend? Why not? Are you in a largely Hispanic market that's not as that's not served by a Spanish language station weekend Latino? I think there are ways to be creative, and there's ways to do this. Sometimes we just think about format, format, format, format, and we don't think about opportunities, and that crosses the line. That's both over the air and digital

Matt Cundill  47:44  
for 2025 it's, I mean, here we are. We're in early October, so we're in the last quarter, and we can look a little bit ahead to 2025 but what excites you for 2025

Tony Garcia  47:56  
for our business, it's the ability to expand. We've had some success with publishing, and we're going to double down on publishing next year. We're going to some really fun stuff that we're going to put together. We're crowdsourcing a cookbook that we hope to publish and sell in q2 of 2025 we're talking about a coffee table book for the end of 2025 so a lot of what we're doing and what we're looking at is around publishing, because we found with our demos, we find that, you know, selling them a T shirts, not their thing, but something a little bit more tangible and something that is more useful, a book, a calendar, those kind of things seem to resonate with our with our folks.

Matt Cundill  48:36  
Tony, thanks so much for jumping on and doing this podcast and chatting with me.

Tony Garcia  48:41  
Oh my goodness, Matt, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to talk to you, whether it's at a conference or on a podcast. I really appreciate the time. The

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  48:48  
sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan serminsky, edited by Taylor McClain, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company, there's always more at sound off podcast.com, you.