Michael Walker: All right, I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Mark Samuels. So, Mark, I'm gonna give you a quick intro. Mark founded the Grammy-winning Basin Street Records. They represent iconic New Orleans artists like Rebirth Brass Band, Kermit Ruffins, and Jon Cleary. They've got over 25 years of global acclaim and have won multiple lifetime achievement awards. He was also named one of the 20 most influential people in Louisiana by OffBeat Magazine.

So today, I'm excited to have him here to hear his experience—27-plus years of running a label and dealing with the ups and downs. Mark, I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the podcast today.

Mark Samuels: It's my pleasure.

Michael: Awesome. So, let's just dive right into it.

Clearly, you have a lot of experience watching the different waves of the music industry come and go. I'm curious, from your perspective, what are some of the unique challenges and problems that you see artists struggling with right now in today's music industry? And how do those compare to the problems you've seen in the past? Are they the same or different?

Mark: That's a good question. Thank you very much, Michael, for having me on.

I started the label as a night and weekend hobby in 1997. Initially, it was designed to just put out an album by Kermit Ruffins. I had initially been asked to invest some money in a recording, and I was looking for something new to do.

I have a lot of experience in other industries—oil and natural gas and computer consulting—and I was looking for something more fun and interesting. It was a night and weekend hobby while I was still in the oil and gas business.

That was 1997. If you look at the sales charts, physical sales back in 1997 and 1998 were probably two of the top three years ever in physical music sales.

We started by recording a live album at Tipitina's in New Orleans in November 1997. We planned for it, put flyers on telephone poles, and went to all five universities in New Orleans. We ended up selling out the show—800 people for this live recording.

As it got closer, we thought, "Oh, shoot, what if it rains that day?" But as it turned out, we made a really great record. At that time, Kermit was already New Orleans' Entertainer of the Year and was looking for a new record label. He gave us the opportunity, as a fledgling label, to put out a record for him.

In January, we manufactured cassettes and CDs. We sold them through dozens of local outlets—coffee shops, record stores, and big retailers like Barnes & Noble, Borders, Warehouse Music, Circuit City, and Best Buy.

Today, we're probably down to seven good outlets in New Orleans to sell physical products. Instead of checking on them every week or two, we're checking on them every month or two. It's a completely different thing.

Physical sales peaked in 1999 and 2000. We saw big-box retailers take over, using Tuesdays for new releases to get people in stores—so they’d buy the latest Britney Spears CD along with a washing machine. Music was used as a loss leader. Then we watched Napster emerge—the initial Napster, where people just burned CDs for friends.

We're a niche label—blues, R&B, soul, funk, rock, jazz—so we don't have a lot of people doing what we do. But Napster and the shift in distribution affected all the great record stores. Today, there's no Virgin Records, Tower Records, Borders, or Warehouse Music. They're gone.

We've had to adjust over the years, and in 27 years, we've faced many hurdles from the music side. And here in New Orleans, we've also had plenty of hurdles from just a life perspective that we've had to overcome.

Michael: Awesome. I suppose with 27 years in the business, you’ve had to overcome quite a few hurdles just to still be around today.

Mark: That's right.

To give you an example—today, I can say, "Go to our website." We've got a brand-new record by Kermit. That first record we released in February 1998—Kermit Ruffins & the Barbecue Swingers Live—just got a new vinyl release two weeks ago.

It was never released on vinyl initially. We waited until our 20th anniversary to do that, and now we have another release of it. This time, it's on silver translucent vinyl. We give our fans these products because we want to stay viable and have something to sell.

At the same time, anyone can go online and find all of Kermit Ruffins' catalog—not just the 15 projects we've done with him but also the three he did with Justice Records before that as a solo artist, plus everything he did with the Rebirth Brass Band. They can listen to any song at any time, anywhere, from their phone.

I don’t have to worry about whether they go to a record store to buy it in order for us to get paid. That has its advantages and disadvantages.

From an artist standpoint, recording today is also a whole lot easier than when we got started.

That first record was very inexpensive to make because it was a live recording. We hired an audio engineer who brought out a mobile soundboard. We made a record, mixed it in a few days, and that was it—it was a live cut. We recorded the whole album.

Michael: There were two shows that night, two sets. Everybody could stay the whole night. But we basically recorded the same music, first set and second set.

Mark: Almost everything we used was from the first set.

Michael: The first set.

Mark: Very little tweaking, very little overdubbing—just a little bit here and there to correct a cracked note or two. But it’s got this great live vibe, and it was a record that probably cost about $8,000 to make.

Over the years, we've had other records where we worked with 59 musicians and spent weeks in Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, recording music with Los Hombres Calientes. We have five records by them, and those were $60,000 to $80,000 recordings.

Today, there are plenty of opportunities for an artist to make a recording. Probably, you want to pay for good musicians to be on it with you, and you want to have sound engineers who know what they're doing. Otherwise, you'll spend a lot more time at it without knowing what you're doing. But you can make recordings now for a lot less.

And I encourage people to do that for as little as they have to while still making a great-quality recording. Have it planned out because it's a whole lot easier to spend money than it is to make money. That’s a lesson I've learned over the years.

There are a whole lot of ego-driven things you can do—putting a billboard on Canal Street in New Orleans, for example.

Michael: New Orleans.

Mark: It's not going to draw a lot of people. That $2,000 to $3,000 a month is probably not going to come back in music sales. It might come back in selling tickets to your show, music sales, and getting opportunities from other festivals around the world.

If you put up a billboard during the New Orleans Jazz Festival, when there are two weeks of music going on, maybe you'll get a bang for your buck. But those are some of the lessons, some of the things we used to do that we no longer do.

We used to put artists on tour buses, paying for two or three weeks a month of travel and tour support. But that's just not something we can afford to do these days. We have to look for smarter ways to promote the artists.

Michael: The smart way is to promote the arts.

Spending money is easier than making money. It kind of reminds me of the concept that it's easier to break things than it is to build them. It doesn’t take much effort to break something—it’s actually pretty fun. But actually building it, putting it together, thinking through the process, and orchestrating everything takes a lot more energy and effort.

I'm curious about your perspective on some of the emerging technologies today. At the time of recording this, AI is a big one. It seems to be revolutionizing a lot—not just the business side, but also the generative music side.

You talked about how easy it is to create high-quality music now. How much easier could it be than just having an idea—"I want a song about this"—and then AI creates a fully produced song? It's not quite there yet, but it’s pretty close.

What’s your perspective on all of this?

Mark: It scares me a lot.

Look, the artists on our record label—Kermit Ruffins has been playing trumpet and singing since he was 16 years old on street corners in the French Quarter.

We have artists like Irvin Mayfield, who went to the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, studied the horn, got mentored by Wynton Marsalis, and put effort into his craft. He’s a trumpet player, but he's also a producer. Now he's a guitar player too, and he’s studied and studied.

Dr. Michael White has performed with everyone from Wynton Marsalis to Marianne Faithfull to Paul Simon. He’s a student of the clarinet, a student of New Orleans jazz, a student of humanity. He was Louisiana Humanist of the Year several years ago.

That education, that practice, that drive—that’s kind of missing today.

With samples and just being able to operate a keyboard, you can create music without putting in thousands of hours of practice on an instrument. Our label is about roots music. It’s about people who have studied and performed on keyboards, pianos, saxophones, trumpets—musicians who have truly learned how to play and understand music theory.

Michael: Computers have made—

Mark: Computers have made music theory less important for creating music. But that’s not what I listen to. I don’t listen to a whole lot of that.

Most people listen to whatever is shoved down their throats, primarily by the conglomerates that own record labels and radio stations.

Michael: Major corporations.

Mark: Major corporations that own hundreds of radio stations around the country. They own all the TV networks, the film studios—whatever gets pushed down people’s throats, that’s what they listen to.

It can be anything. If you hear it enough, you'll start to like it.

I work out at Hotworx in a sauna almost every day. They play music in there, and even though I’ve said, “I can’t stand this music,” I hear it every day. Now I’m singing along to it.

It will grow on you.

I prefer to know and hear a band that performs together, that has practiced together, where each musician has worked on their craft individually.

AI scares me. It’s building off of what our artists have done. It’s learning from everything we’ve done—plagiarizing in many cases.

If I were to tell AI, “Give me something that sounds like a New Orleans brass band playing outside during a parade,” it could probably do it. But at what cost to real musicians?

Michael: Thank you for sharing that. That was a very honest answer. Yeah, it's wild. What I'm hearing you say is that it scares you because it's really building off of this training data source of all the music that's come before it.

Many artists and labels have invested hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into creating this asset, and now these tools are able to use that and create something new that diverts attention away from human artists. One thing that scares you about it is seeing those opportunities going more to the computer versus going to the traditional roots of artists.

Mark: Look, we get calls from music supervisors. We've got a Louis Armstrong track in here, and we don't know if we can clear it. Do you have something that sounds like this to put in a film or a TV show? Generally, yeah, we have Kermit Ruffins—he's got that feel in his music. Michael White has that Louis Armstrong feel in much of his music.

These guys, if you asked them who the most influential person in the world to them is, it's probably Louis Armstrong. We have things that are certainly inspired by Louis Armstrong, original compositions, because these guys admired him. But a film's music supervisor today could say, "We have this piece. Here it is. AI, create something that sounds like this."

It's going to be pieces of Louis Armstrong, Wynton Marsalis, and all kinds of people out there who are creating music. And it's going to replace them for free because the film studio will choose to use that free piece instead of licensing the replacement from us for $10,000. They'll go create something quickly and pay someone to do it fast—a 15-second piece to go in this spot of the film or TV show.

Hopefully, they don’t. Hopefully, the person working on creating things like that also appreciates the fact that there are people down the line who are trying not to be replaced.

Michael: Yeah, I definitely hear where you're coming from. I find this fascinating—AI-generated music and the comparison to the traditional path of how we create music.

The point you made about if someone reaches out and says, "We want a song inspired by Louis Armstrong," as a human, our brain pulls these pieces of identity that influenced us. If we're writing for film, we might even literally try to emulate that style to create something in that realm.

One of the challenging things about AI-generated works is—and I know there are legal experts debating this right now—it sounds like one of the challenges in saying this is copywritten or plagiarized material is that technically, AI creates original content trained on past works. It was influenced or inspired by it, similar to how humans create original material inspired by past artists.

But because it's technically "original" content, it creates more of a gray area. You can tell it's inspired, but you could say the same thing about human-generated work.

I'm curious—given your background in computer consulting—what are your thoughts on computers in general? There are arguments that computers, when they were first introduced, replaced many jobs. The internet also changed the landscape. At one point, 80% of people were farming, and now it's less than 15%.

How do you integrate those two viewpoints—your experience as a computer consultant and your perspective on this issue within the music industry?

Mark: Look, when I worked for a company that's now known as Accenture, we installed systems for things like the UPS package tracking system. My first project was with the New Jersey Department of Labor. They had been doing things the same way for 75 years, and we put in a computer system for them to manage many of their operations.

I was also involved in California with Pac Bell, where we implemented a system to bill for 900 and 976 phone calls. I don’t know if I should say this on the podcast or not, but we were known as the "phone sex billing system people" because that was the primary type of call coming through those lines. But technology kept changing, and we learned to adapt.

That company was also involved in some of the very first mortgage-backed securities—the kind that eventually led to the collapse of the financial industry years ago. We put in systems that allowed them to analyze pools of mortgages to create these securities. Computers made that possible, and this was back in the mid-'80s.

I didn’t use many computers in college. I didn’t even see a PC until my senior year, and I didn’t do any programming. But computers have done wonders for this industry.

Our first records were recorded on 2-inch tape, which was a huge barrier to entry for anyone trying to do recording back then. When we started in 1998, we had to record on those machines, and they were incredibly expensive. There were DAT machines at the time, but even those were costly. Now, with computer hard drives and the cost of storage dropping so much, for just a couple of grand, you can have all the storage and a great recording system designed for your needs.

Even the device I’m using right now—a small two-in-one PC—can handle everything I need to record and upload music. We use The Orchard to distribute our music worldwide across different platforms. I can log into the dashboard, upload a song and artwork, and within about four days, it’s available globally.

That wasn’t possible before. I used to have to manufacture CDs and wait weeks for them to arrive. Then, I’d distribute them to retailers. If I wanted to sell through Borders, I’d ship the CDs to their central warehouse, and they would then send them out to stores. I had to send way more than they needed just to secure enough shelf space. And if I wanted prime placement, I had to pay for it.

Now, with digital distribution, I can work from almost anywhere—whether I’m in the car waiting for my son at swim practice or taking a trip to Florida. I don’t have to worry about stocking physical stores like Borders, which had 300 locations and required me to ship 1,500 CDs just to have five copies per store. I’d have to ensure there were enough to be visible or even pay for a listening station or an eye-level display spot.

The way we do things now is completely different. But I still love selling physical products. I enjoy getting a web order for something like John Cleary’s record—one we originally released in 2002 and recently pressed on vinyl for the first time. I love packing up an order and shipping it to Australia, knowing that our music is reaching people worldwide.

Even in that process, computers have changed everything. The money comes in almost instantly. When someone enters their Visa number on our website, the funds are in our account within two days. That kind of transaction wasn’t possible when we started.

Michael: So cool. I love conversations like this because it’s so interesting to hear how much things have changed. I mean, 27 years is a long time. But at the same time, in relative terms, it’s such a short period, and things have evolved so much. It just makes me wonder—27 years from now, man...

Mark: I have children who are from 35 to 15. That little 15-year difference—20-year difference between the oldest and the youngest—about a 15-year difference between my previous youngest and the new youngest. Those are different generations. One has grown up with a device in his hands. He was a little delayed—we waited, my wife and I, until he was in high school before he had a true iPhone-type of device, an iPhone hand-me-down. But many of his friends had devices in their hands starting in elementary school—third or fourth grade—accessing videos and songs. And he's got his Spotify account.

He's listening to whatever when he's playing video games. They're being exposed to music in a different way. It's hard to get him to even watch a football game or anything else. It's a totally different generation than my children who are 15, 20 years old. So, 15 years from now, 27 years from now—who knows? I hope I'm still around to see it. I don't think I'm going to still own this record label at that time.

Michael: Oh, man, who knows? The latest book that I've read, talking about this subject of technology and the future, is The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. He predicted the internet before the internet happened and kind of predicted AI before it happened. The main point of the book is that information technology is on an exponential curve.

It's changing faster and faster, and we don't understand exponentials very well. But when they hit, there's this straight-up asymptote. One of the things he predicts is "longevity escape velocity," where—I forget the exact year he predicted, I think probably five or ten years from now—he predicted that longevity advancements, you know, how right now, I think we get back roughly 0.2 years for every year that passes. So it's not enough to catch us up. But at a point where advances in something like nanotechnology could reverse decay from the inside out—maybe in the next five to ten years.

It's a pretty far-out idea. But I would love to have a conversation 27 years from today, Mark, and reflect on this moment and see where things are at.

Mark: Yeah, that's one of the reasons I really appreciate being able to document things with phone calls and video opportunities.

I was talking about the hurdles over a lifetime. You realize, like last week, everything was shut down in New Orleans for a week. We had what I hope was a once-in-a-lifetime snow event in New Orleans. I don't ever have to see that much snow again in New Orleans. I've got a trip planned in a few months to Canada to go ski, and I'm happy to see snow there. But I live in New Orleans because I don't really want to be exposed to it all the time.

That was a really cool week, though—of not being able to go anywhere. School was shut down. I didn’t have to get up at 6:30 to get my son off to school.

I just got to have a couple of days of being outside. I couldn't go visit any retailers. The post office was shut down. Just a few days of everything shutting down—walking around outside in a foot of snow.

I hope that people begin to long for those kinds of opportunities where they are not always wired in.

Because it is a whole lot healthier. And as I've gotten older, I've made a plan this year to leave town the weekend before Jazz Fest. Not something I would have done years ago.

But through my maturity and age, I've realized, you know what, I can leave town. Some of it is technology. Some of it is the fact that I know if there's something I need to do that week, I can get somebody to do it for me. I have good staff—a small staff, but a great staff.

I also recognize that there are things to do besides what you think is important at that time. There are other, more important things to do.

It's like putting your phone down and talking to your kid every chance you get.

Unfortunately, I lost my wife. I've been married now for 16 more years, but I lost my first wife when my children were really young. And I recognize that being able to put down your phone and spend time visiting is also important.

I feel very fortunate that I've had a life where craziness like the levees breaking during Hurricane Katrina, a week of being shut down because of a foot of snow, the BP oil spill, or COVID happened. Not that I want any of those things to ever happen again, and it would have been fine if they didn’t happen in the first place. But those are the things that you grow from.

Michael: So good. Well, I'm grateful that I get to have conversations like this and learn from experience. I always prefer, as much as possible, to learn from other people’s lessons rather than having to learn the hard way myself.

I'm very grateful, Mark, for you taking the time to be here and to share your perspective—where you’ve come from, where things are now.

I feel like this is an interesting conversation, illustrating both the benefits of technology but also the risks and things to be aware of. It’s not all positive.

I love technology. I grew up with a computer. I geek out on AI. So it's easy for me to not fully take off my blinders and really sit with the realities of what this technology can do.

I always appreciate the opportunity to have conversations like this.

For anyone listening or watching right now who is interested in connecting more with you or learning more about the record label, where would you recommend they go to take the next steps?

Mark: I encourage people, if they want to ask me any questions, to text or email me at mark@basinstreetrecords.com. I'm happy to answer questions.

I'm probably not going to listen to anybody’s package. I'm not looking for new artists. It’s rare that I’ll listen to anything when I’m not looking for something new to do, a new project. So I would not send me an unsolicited package of music.

But questions? I’m always happy to help other people not make the mistakes I've made over the years.

And at the top of that list, as I said earlier, is being very careful about where you spend money. I have two million dollars invested in this label. It’s important—whether it was my money or someone else’s money.

These days, I don’t have great advice on how to spend it most effectively, other than to say, be very careful about how it's spent. Also, make sure that what you put out there is what you want to have out there for a lifetime.

I would be proud for any of our projects to be picked up years from now and listened to in their entirety.

I would be even happier if it was picked up right now and listened to in its entirety because that will help us as a label, our artists, and their families.

I encourage people to explore our catalog at BasinStreetRecords.com. You'll find links to our YouTube page, there's a sampler where you can listen to a song from every album in our catalog.

Our artists have won—four of our artists are Grammy Award winners. We have Billboard Award winners.

Just to rattle them off, we’ve got people like Jon Cleary, who played with Bonnie Raitt for a number of years, Taj Mahal, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Tom Jones—he played with all those guys.

We have the Rebirth Brass Band, who won our first Grammy for a project that we did. We have other artists who have won Grammys for other records.

We have an artist named Kevin Gulledge who just got a Blues Music Award for Best Emerging Artist Album. He put out that album after he did one with us.

There’s a lot of great music on our label to explore. Email me. Friend us on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Twitter.

And you’ll also discover why I’m irritated with Elon Musk.

Michael: Amazing. Awesome. Like always, we'll put the links in the show notes for easy access.

Mark, thank you for coming on the podcast today. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Mark: Thank you.

Michael: YEAAAH!