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Tom Windish Interview

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EP04: Interview with Tom Windish

By David Weiszfeld

Published April 22, 2019

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About This Episode

This time around we were lucky enough to get 50 minutes with Tom Windish, founder of The Windish Agency, merged into Paradigm in 2015. Throughout his extensive career as one of the worlds most prominent booking agents, Tom worked with acts from Low and Squarepusher to Diplo, Billie Eilish and more.

Today, we will talk about his path to the top of the live industry, from booking his first campus show to representing some of the biggest names in the industry, and share advice to all young professionals and artists out there.

Topics & Highlights

02:55 — On starting out in the live industry

When I got to college, I decided to join the radio station, [and] it became the thing I was most excited about, most obsessed with. I would do any slot that was open: the 4 to 7 a.m. in the morning or the Sunday morning at 8 a.m. — I would do anything just so I could get on the air, [...] Then, when I was a freshman, [through the radio station] I fell into putting on my first show, which was on the last day of class: a friend of mine, [who's] job it was to put on this show for the station, decided to drop out of school. So he taught me how to do it. I ended up booking a couple of bands [...], and in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, this guy came to me and he said "you know, I'm the Campus Activities Director. One of my jobs is to appoint the person in charge of all the campus concerts — and the only ones I'm excited about seeing are the ones that you booked. So, would you like to be in charge of the whole thing?" And I was very excited, I said "yes "and just kind of jumped into booking ton of bands Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., Cypress Hill and loads of other bands.

After the internship [at the William Morris Agency], I just started booking tours for bands right away, at my first agency, called Bug Booking. [...]. And that went well: one of my first bands was called Low, who I still book. Another band was called Hum, and they ended up selling almost a million records. A funny story about Hum: I booked them in my college, and They were the opening act for another band. The agent was like "you have to pay this opening act a 100 bucks". And I said: "Sure. Cool. No big deal." [And then] I got this letter in the mail with a piece of notebook paper handwritten. It said "Hum rider" and then they wrote on it "Two pizzas, two cases of beer". They were playing at this campus pub and the only thing they sold at this place was beer and pizza. So I said, "you can have as much as you want". And [then], a year later, when I was a booking, I heard that they were looking for an agent and I called them up. And they said: "Well you're the only person who got us both the pizza and the beer. So let's go."

11:55 — On moving from Bug Booking to Billions

I was living in upstate New York at the time when I started Bug. And then, I got a deal on rent [in Chicago] for a hundred dollars a month — I lived above a classic rock club called Lounge Ax. It was sort of the CBGB of Chicago. At the time, the music scene in Chicago was amazing. There were all these independent labels and bands... The labels called "Touch and Go" and "Drag City" and "Thrill Jockey" and Liz Phair was coming up then and Smashing Pumpkins. So I moved there and I started “Bug Chicago” above this rock club, in very raw accommodations, but I loved it — even though everyone thought "this is weird" or "uncomfortable" or "it's hard to sleep at night". It never really crossed my mind. And then, six months later, I got a call from the guy who owns Billions, Boche and asked if I would be interested in talking to him about working there. That was the best thing that ever could have happened to me. I loved the Billions: they had Pavement, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and a lot of my favorite bands — it was just a dream come true. [Through Billions I was] introduced to label people, managers and it gave me a bit of professionalism that I was lacking. And a little bit of infrastructure. I worked there for about seven years. I started with rock bands and my musical palette sort of grew while I was there and I got into certain types of electronic music. Back then we called it IDM (Intelligent Dance Music). It was before EDM. And people at Billions didn't like the music that I was booking and playing in the office.

16:20 — On leaving Billions and starting The Windish Agency

My personal roster grew a lot. For the first year or so every electronic artist I went after [...] said no, because I didn't have a single artist that was in that world that could say he does a good job. But then one day I got a call from Astralwerks. [And] I booked the tour in two weeks [for their]  artist named μ-Ziq. [...] I approached it with a level of professionalism that was more common in rock than electronic music — they really liked that and the word started to spread that "this guy's really good at booking tours". Then I got a call from the owner of Warp Records, booked Autechre, and then that led to Squarepusher, [...] Ninja Tune, [...] Coldcut, [...] Amon Tobin, Cinematic Orchestra, Kid Koala, St. Germain and more. And it just continued to spread from there. But I continued to feel isolated, more and more on an island at Billions. And I thought, [that] if I took the revenue that was going straight to the agency, and spent it on people to support these artists — I'd actually be able to provide a better service for them. So I thought about it for a long time, like three years, and then finally I started The Windish agency in my apartment. I had one employee, and we put up a one-page website — the Internet wasn't a big thing at the time. Soon we needed another person, and then another and it just grew and grew...

22:45 — On success of The Windish Agency and the live industry in the Napster era

I think that we worked really hard and we were always thinking "how can we do this better" Our approach, I think, was different than a lot of our competitors. We were signing a lot of stuff that they just weren't familiar with — and that was new. But [...] also Napster happened a few years after the Windish agency started, and [it] was an incredible thing for the artists that we booked. [They] were pretty hard to discover: for a lot of them, you couldn't buy the records in the United States — you had to order them from the record store. [...] It was really expensive, and it would take six weeks to arrive. You'd hear about these [artists] not through Rolling Stone, but through fanzines, [that] was printed out on a photocopier and stapled together by a person who would mail them to their friends [to say this is great music].

And then the Internet came along and all of a sudden, our artists’ music was available for free on the Internet. So everyone could go, download it, and then tell their friends. And almost immediately, more people were buying tickets to see the shows. So we benefited greatly from that. We didn't plan it, obviously, we didn't even really realize it was happening while it was happening — it was only several years after [when we] realized: "Oh, that was good". At the time, we were just kind of riding a wave, and more and more artists that were doing well — and then the wave evolved. Someone like Diplo, who was originally quite underground and hard to find, ultimately became what he is [now]. That happened with a bunch of the artists that we work with: they broke out of the underground into the mainstream. And I think that the ease of discovering them was a part of why they got to become as big as they are. [...] There was all this press about how terrible things were and how the labels were falling apart. And I was sitting there, thinking "more people are going to see the artist I'm booking. We're doing better, we're getting bigger, we're selling more tickets, making more money — feels good!".

32:00  — On Paradigm

They were a film-TV agency in Beverly Hills, in L.A, and about 13 years ago, they acquired an agency called “Monterey Peninsula Artists". It had similar DNA to the Windish agency —  It was these two guys, who had been at a major agency, in L.A., and decided "we're leaving, we’ll move in Monterey, California and we're going to start our company. And everyone thought they were nuts, but they went up there and became the best independent agency in the business. [...] Then Paradigm acquired another agency in New York called "Little Big Man" which was started by Marty Diamond — again, in a somewhat similar way: it was in his apartment, just him and a few people, [signing] all these bands when people didn't knew who they were. Like Coldplay and Ed Sheeran and loads of other artists. He grew that company to one of the best independent agencies, and then it was acquired by Paradigm.

Then [Paradigm] went into a partnership with AM Only, one of the best DJ agencies in the U.S. Again, [it was] started in a very similar way by Paul Morris in the back of a record shop, booking Tiestö with one employee. [...] Then [Paradigm] did a partnership with Coda Agency and X-Ray Touring, also [big] independents started from the ground up. And then, they did a deal with us. [...] I'd say, all of those agencies share something with what I had at Windish. They were all an underdog, outside of the big company, which I think drives a certain culture within the company.

41:33 — On challenges of the live industry today

The Holy Grail with Tech and touring would be to figure out what size venues the artists could play and how much you could charge for the ticket price. The reality is that there’s not enough venues in the world right now to service the number of artists that can fill them. There's been a shift, [and] there's a lot of artists [than there used to be], that can sell 300 tickets, 500 tickets, 1000 tickets, 2000 tickets. But, [in general], bands still play the same venues that were there 20 years ago. One of the repercussions of that is that the venues get booked up 9 months, 10 months in advance. I have no idea how [the show] is going to be received in 9 or 10 months. Often, the music's not even out yet! So there's still a lot of sort of gut instinct going on. More than I'd like — and maybe someone will figure it out someday.

[...] Selling tickets directly to the fans — I think it's a fantastic thing. It's uncommon in the United States because of the way businesses are set up and the rules and regulations. [...] I wish that when I put a show on sale, I could tell how many people want to buy a ticket and then just sell it to them. Instead [doing the same thing], that we had 20 years ago: "hey, tickets for this show we're going to go on sale on Friday at 10 a.m". That's just so ridiculous and outdated. Most people I know that want to buy a ticket are at school or at work. And then the ones who go and try that, they [come] and there’s no tickets available — they've already been sold and bought up by scalpers and bots. That's been evolving but — to me — not nearly fast enough.

48:05 — On his advice to 19-year-olds

I mean, seeking out mentors would be a great thing for a 19-year-old to do. I’ve gotten to where I've gotten by hustling, also. But also asking people for help or their advice or opinion and how they would do things. As it relates to situations that my clients are in. [...] Also, I think that if you wanted to get into music — consume tons of music, go to tons of shows. Big ones, small ones. I never went on tour with a band, but if you want to be an agent I'd recommend doing that. And beyond the things that are related to just music, the demands of an agent now are much different than they were. So I would really recommend that 19-year-olds "soak up life”! Go, do, see, and talk to as many people as you possibly can — in all areas. That will influence and then help you immensely. Go see art, read literature, listen to politics, read the newspaper, travel the world, go meet people.

How you pay for all this? I don't know. But [...] I had a band from Japan who had a tour, making five hundred dollars a night, opening for someone. They really didn't have much money, but they figured it out, they did like 30 shows, and they lost two thousand dollars doing it — which is not a lot in the grand scheme of things. They bought a van at the beginning of the tour and they sold it at the end, for just a little bit less than they paid for it. And they did a lot of other things that were crafty and probably very uncomfortable. I guess I'd encourage 19-year-olds who are not musicians but are looking to get into the business to sort of approach life the same way, frugally — and do as much as possible. Because the more experience you have and the broader your palette — the better off you're gonna be and the more well-rounded your advice and approach [to] things is gonna be.

I think it's an incredible time in the world today. There's so much great art and messages. I'm really excited to just be in a position where I can help people to have a louder voice. I'm finding music from all over the place, and lots of other people are finding it too, and buying tickets to see it, and supporting [the artists]. [...] There's more bizarre and amazing stuff happening there than ever, and then when you hear it, it just sounds like the most obvious greatest thing. Like Khruangbin — I love that band. They're really really popular, but 10-15 years ago, no one ever would have said that band is gonna be huge. One of the things that excite me most is seeing bands that the traditional music industry would have always said: "that band will never be huge". Seeing them be huge. We're bound by these rules, and norms, and notions that really don't have much basis in reality. I love helping to break those rules and norms and show the world that they're wrong.

I've been booking French hip hop artists in America with great success — and it's not just French people go into these shows. Thousands of people turn up without the support of record companies. [...] I've been booking artists from Africa, I've been booking neoclassical artists. With all of them, the music blows me away. And it's wonderful that lots and lots of people are feeling the same thing I am, because in the old days, people wouldn't have bought tickets to see them. They wouldn't have bought their records either. Now, we're in an ecosystem where it's thriving to do what you want to do, or what feels natural, what feels right, what feels "you". I encourage artists to spend time figuring that out — and not comparing themselves to others, saying "if we just got this festival or this brand partnership we would be popular". I don't think there's any truth to that. I think if you write music that you love, that's how you have the highest chance of success, of being discovered. If you're truly authentic if you are vulnerable. And it's a wonderful thing.

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Artists Mentioned (in alphabetical order)

Companies Mentioned (in alphabetical order)

Full Transcript

David Weiszfeld [00:00]: All right. Hello everybody. I'm extremely excited today to speak with Tom Windish. I've known Tom for a little while, but actually never really asked him about his path and story. So this is a personal present to myself. Tom has been internationally recognized as one of the top agents in the world for about 20-25 years and has been running The Windish Agency, who recently did an M&A with Paradigm Agency. So today he's one of the top senior executives at the new Parallel-Paradigm group. So yeah, Tom thanks for doing this.  As a live Industry executive, do you actually remember your first show? Not the one that you’d put on, but the one that you attended?

Tom Windish [00:49]: My first show was Huey Lewis & the News. I don't know if you know what that is in France. I think I was like 14 or something. He had this album called Sports, it was a big, big soundtrack with Back to the Future movie and I went with my dad. I remember seeing like my friends from school there and they all thought I was lame, because I was there with my dad and ironically, strangely it turns out that that show was booked by a man who now is one of my business partners at Paradigm. And Paradigm still books Huey Lewis.

David Weiszfeld [01:40]: That is coming full circle right alright.

Tom Windish [01:45]: So that was my first ever. They were a bunch of other ones early on: U2. It was a big one. That was in a football stadium when I was a teenager. I lived in upstate New York. So there wasn't like this small club kind of shows really that I could go to. I don't think there was a club that was all ages. When I was a little bit older in high school, I think my senior year, I went and saw this band called Camper Van Beethoven that I was really obsessed with when I was in high school. I listened to a lot of music and in high school, because I had this lawn mowing business. And the whole time I was mowing lawns I was listening to music. So I started digging deep with music at a pretty young age. Kind of out of boredom and I would go to the record store with my lawn mowing money and buy a few records each week, basically, and then play them all week, and go get more. When I got to college, I decided to join the radio station. I just decided to do that because a friend suggested it. I didn't have this strong inclination to do it. But as soon as I did join that, it became the thing I was most excited about, most obsessed with. And I would do like any radio, any slot that was open: the 4 to 7 a.m. in the morning or the Sunday morning at 8 a.m. or whatever. I would do anything just so I could get on the air, and then I would spend a lot of time in the record libraries playing lots and lots of different types of music. Beyond that was called off to alternative music or like. Now I guess you'd call it indie rock. Beyond just that I would play all sorts of experimental stuff, jazz, new wage, rock, and classic stuff. I just kind of dug deep. I had all these friends, we're doing the same thing and we'd constantly say "Have you heard this, have you heard that? You've gotta play this". And I really really enjoyed it. And when I was a freshman, I fell into putting on my first show, which was on the last day of class through the radio station. A friend of mine, that was his job it was to put on this show for the station. And he decided to drop out of school. So he taught me how to do it. Everything was sort of set up. And he also taught me like how to book a band for the next semester. And I ended up booking at a couple of bands. That first band was called The Feelies, who I still really love. And the following semester, I booked a couple of things. And in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, this guy came to me and he said "You know I'm the Campus Activities Director. And one of my jobs is to appoint the person in charge of all the campus concerts and the only ones I'm excited about seeing are the ones that you booked on the last day of class. And it's coming fall. So would you like to be in charge of the whole thing." And I was very excited, I said "yes "and just kind of jumped into booking ton of bands Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., Cypress Hill and loads of other bands. I loved it and I got to know booking agents. I ended up getting an internship at the William Morris Agency in New York and they quickly discovered that I wanted to be an agent. I really loved the role that they played, the closeness to the artists but not too close. And I loved shows and that feeling you get when you're at a concert. It's such a unique thing. You can only get that one time when you're there. And after the internship, I just started booking tours for bands right away. My first agency was called Bug Booking. I was still in college. I kind of dropped out of college a couple of times and went back.

David Weiszfeld [06:34]: You actually built it from the ground up. It was called Bug Booking. Do you remember why you named it Bug?

Tom Windish [06:40]: I named it Bug because, I mean, the only bands that would work with me were the bands that no other agents wanted to book because I was like the newest agent in the country. And no one really knew me and I didn't really know what I was doing, as well as anybody else who was doing it because I was so new. And I had my own company, you know. So it was just me, and I had to bug people so much to book the bands so I called it Bug. And that you know it went well: one of my first bands was called Low, who I still book. I absolutely love that band. Another band was called Hum and they ended up selling almost a million records. And also, they both stayed with me and when they got bigger and everything. A funny story about the band Hum: I book them in my college. They were the opening act for another band. I didn't know them. The agent was like "oh you have to pay this opening act a 100 bucks". And I said "Sure. Cool. No big deal." And they were playing at this place on campus called the Campus pub and I get this letter in the mail with a piece of notebook paper handwritten. It says "Hum writer" and then they write on it "two pizzas two cases of beer".

So they show up and they were playing at this campus pub and the only thing they sold at this place was beer and pizza. So I said, "you can have as much as you want". And like a year later, when I was booking, I was an agent. I heard they were looking for an agent and I called them up. And they said "Well you're the only person who got us both the pizza and the beer. So let's go." And then they became very popular. Yeah, I'm still friends with them to this day.

David Weiszfeld [08:42]: So yeah if we backtrack a little bit. I had no idea about this long ongoing business when you were a kid and then I knew that you launched Bug. So consider yourself like an entrepreneurial spirit person? Did you do things because you just couldn't get the top agent's job in major companies, like f*** it, let's just started it? Or is it something that you've always wanted to start, something of your own? Because most agents actually start a big agency: like a booking coordinator, you understand a bit how the big machine works and then you get your first act within that big thing. You actually took a completely different route which is starting a very very small agency and then actually you move through Billions after Bug Booking.

Tom Windish [09:29]:  I do think there are lots of different types of entrepreneurialism. I do think I have some sort of desire to build things, to do a good job and all that. There are similarities between the lawn mowing thing and Bug Booking. I was pretty obsessed with both of them, and doing a great job, and just finding more stuff, more great things to do. So yeah, I do think I have an entrepreneurial bug. At that time it was a little bit different. I could have gone to work at a big agency I guess. But there were a good number of independent booking agencies. These days there really aren't many. A lot of them have been acquired by larger companies. The path I took which today sounds like unique, or leftfield, but at that time it wasn't that uncommon. It really never even crossed my mind to go work for a big agency, to be honest, and I imagine they would have said "no thanks" if I had even tried. Yeah.

David Weiszfeld [10:58]: So then at this point, from Bug you moved to Billions. Which is still operating today and there have bands like Arcade Fire and others. Can you tell me about that move? And then the seven-year experience which was I guess the first agent's job at a larger firm? How is that different from Bug? What was the positive and learning experience? And then maybe, segway, what made you start Windish after?

Tom Windish [11:27]: This was a long time ago. So at Bug, would print out the contracts on a Dot matrix printer the kind that makes a noise when it's printing — like "a-a". And I would print out like twenty-five of them a day. And I would hand right out the envelopes where to mail these contracts or where to mail tapes for people to listen to. And I was living in upstate New York at the time when I started Bug. Basically, living in my parents' house. And I moved to Chicago. I got a deal on rent there for a hundred dollars a month. I lived above this really classic rock club called Lounge Ax. It was sort of the CBGB of Chicago. At the time, the music scene in Chicago was amazing. There were all these independent labels and bands... The label called "Touch and Go" and "Drag City" and "Thrill Jockey" and Liz Phair was coming up then and Smashing Pumpkins. There was a whole industrial scene. It was a really exciting place to be and I had this deal on rent. So I moved there and I started basically Bug Chicago above this rock club. In very raw accommodations. But I loved it and everyone thought "this is weird" or "uncomfortable" or "it's hard to sleep at night". It never really crossed my mind. And then about six months later, I got a call from the guy who owns Billions, Boche and asked if I would be interested in talking to him about working there. And at that time like that was like the best thing that ever could have happened to me in my head and both and professionally too. But I loved the billions they had Pavement and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and a lot of my favorite bands and it was just a dream come true. And one of the big benefits of Billions was that I got to learn about plugging a lot of things I had never learned on my own. That could mean like "oh there's a great promoter in this place in Texas, you should know him or her. They'll help you book shows". Maybe that was a city that I was like skipping. I just didn't know or the person wouldn't call me back or something. And then he also introduced me to some label people, some managers and gave me like a bit of professionalism that I was lacking on my own. And a little bit of infrastructure. I worked there for about seven years. I started with rock bands and my musical palette sort of grew while I was there and I started getting into electronic music. And for the first year and a half, I decided I really liked certain types of electronic music. Back then we called it IDM. It was before EDM.

David Weiszfeld [14:45]: I was for international, international dance music or?

Tom Windish [14:52]: I for Intelligent Dance Music. And it was basically like this music that people were making on their computers with lots of bleeps. There was even a series called bleep and stuff. A lot of the rock people said "this is not music. They're not doing anything". I remember the first Coachella I went to. I went to take my friend to see Autechre. Before I was booking them and I said  "there they are. This is amazing". And they were on the stage playing their music and he said "where? There's nothing going on up there" and it was these two guys lean over their laptops. I said "that's them, that's it" he's like "when did it start?". And the people at Billions didn't like the music that I was booking, playing in the office. They didn't really go to the shows. They put me in this separate office so that I could play the music.

David Weiszfeld [16:02]: The first dance department's at record labels was usually one guy in an office listening to weird music. And Then and then the thing grows...

Tom Windish [16:16]: So they didn't go to the shows that I was booking and my personal roster grew a lot. The first year or so: every artist I went after to book them, they all said no. Because I didn't have like one artist that was in that world that could say he does a good job. And there was this other guy who had his own agency, and he had, all the artists I liked would go to him. But then one day I got a call from Astralwerks. They said, "Are you still interested in booking that artist that you wanted to book a year ago?" I was like "absolutely, what's up?" And they're like “Oh, that other guy just didn't book the tour. So we're upset and we want to give you a shot". So I booked the tour in two weeks or something. I was like over the moon. And it was a great tour. It was this artist named μ-Ziq  and another artist named Luke Vibert opened. The shows all sold out and I approached it with a level of professionalism that was more common with like the more rock booking approach than electronic had at that time. And they really liked that and the word kind of started to spread that "this guy's really good at booking tours". So then I got a call from the guy that the owner of Warp Records which was a really influential electronic label at the time. And he asked if I wanted to book a tour for Autechre which I was again like floored and over the moon about. And then that led to Squarepusher, and Luke Vibert. And then Ninja Tune called and asked if I were in the book tour for Coldcut who were the founders of Ninja Tune. And that led to Amon Tobin, Cinematic Orchestra, Kid Koala, and more. And it just continued to spread from there. I ended up signing an artist named St. Germain, like the biggest artists I'd ever booked. They had some huge songs and things just continued to grow. But I continued to feel isolated, more and more on an island at Billions. And I thought you know if I took the revenue that was coming in, that was going straight to the agency, and spent it on people to support these artists. I'd actually be able to provide a better service for them. So I thought about it for a long time, like three years. I was afraid to do anything and really uncertain, and then it just became more and more clear that it was something I needed to do. And then finally I did it, and I started the Windish agency in my apartment. I had one employee, and we sort of hit the ground running. And we put up the one-page website. The Internet wasn't a big thing at the time but we had our one-page Website with our roster. And soon we needed another person, and then another and it just grew and grew... And we finally moved out of my apartment and into an office. I found an employee named Sam Hunt very early on. I think he was the third employee and he ended up being a really great addition to the company. It started out kind of doing whatever I asked him to do, answering the phones, and chase the contracts, and anything. He ended up booking tours and then eventually signing artists. The first artist I think that he signed was Girl Talk, who ended up being really really popular and influential. Because I had this relationship with  Ninja Tune, I had Diplo on the roster — I think at the time he was called Hollertronix. I didn't really know what to do with it. There wasn't too much going on, and I asked Sam if he could just like take care of it. And he took the ball and ran with that too. That did great. So Sam became a really huge part of the company. And then we hired another guy named Brad Owen, he was a booking and nightclub in Chicago. Forever. And you know we're kind of like "Would you rather work from like 9:00 to 5:00 instead of from 5 to 3 a.m. every night?". I remember he was really unsure and then finally decided to come over. He also did really well. Quite fast. And the company group just kept growing.

David Weiszfeld [21:46]: I didn't know out of the seven years at Billions that after four you were already kind of projecting the Windish. Do you think that Windish kind of took momentum very quickly because you gave it so much thought before you left? There is always a sense of right spot, right time, right music. You had the good years before everybody else in the market. But do you think the time to prepare — the three years of actually thinking about what would it be, to start again, another agency, but maybe on another scale that Bug — helped? Or would you have started three years earlier and it would have been the same?

Tom Windish [22:28]: You know, I mean it was a combination of all those factors for sure. But I think the time that I spent thinking about it was the least important. I think that we worked really hard and we were always thinking like "how can we do this better" and implementing things to do things better for sure. And our approach to what we signed, I think, was different than a lot of our competitors. I think we're signing a lot of stuff that they just weren't familiar with. And that was new. But the other thing was that: when it really started to take off, it was also this moment in time in the music industry that was extremely advantageous to the types of artists that we were booking. So basically Napster happened, a few years after the Windish agency started. Maybe like three or four years. And Napster was an incredible thing for the artists that we booked. Because the artist we booked was pretty hard to discover. For a lot of them, you couldn't buy the records in the United States. You had to order them from the record store. And it was called an import. You go and order it, it was really expensive, and then it would take six weeks to arrive. And you'd hear about these things not through Rolling Stone or some website but through fanzines. And a fanzine was printed out on a photocopier, stapled together by a person who would say this is great music. And then mail them to their friends. That was the way it was before, very underground. And then the Internet came along and all of a sudden, our artists that we really loved and thought were fantastic. Their music was available for free on the Internet. So everyone could go, download it, and then tell their friends. I heard this amazing record. Go on Napster and get it. And almost immediately, more people were buying tickets to see the shows. So we benefited greatly from that. Didn't plan it, obviously. Didn't even really realize it was happening while it was happening. I mean it was only several years after that we sort of realized that "that was good". And now, 15 20 years later, whatever it is, it's totally obvious. But at the time, we were just kind of riding a wave and there were more and more artists that were doing well. And that wave sort of evolved. So that someone like Diplo, who originally was quite underground and hard to find, ultimately became what he is. And that happened with a bunch of the artists that we work with. They broke out of the underground into the mainstream. And I think that the ease of discovering them and listening to them, was a part of why they got to become as big as they are. I think that a lot of the artists that we booked in the old days, who were amazing, didn't get their fair chops. They never got in the spotlight, because people just didn't know where they were. I've said it's been an incredible time in music, basically ever since Napster. Definitely since Spotify, because then it sort of went from, it was like legitimate, it was legal. It didn't feel weird like you're doing something wrong which I'm sure affected a lot of people. Now, everything is on the Internet, and I think that's a wonderful thing.

David Weiszfeld [26:38]: I think everybody kind of saw Napster and the old Peer to Peer as a great way for music discovery and a very positive way of for unknown artists to find their first audience. But a part of the industry we're so scared of losing revenue, that the discovery part didn't make business sense for them. For people like you, you didn't lose on record sales so it was just this bonus of discovery that would come. I guess today with Spotify, it's both discovery and revenue, at least for the record labels and managers, and so they see it as positively as what some agents would have seen before.

Tom Windish [27:16]: I was sitting there that whole time. There was all this press about how terrible things were and how the labels were falling apart. And this would go on for many years. Constantly reading about it. And I was sitting there, thinking "more people are going to see the artist I'm booking. We're doing better, we're getting bigger, we're selling more tickets, making more money, feels good". No one really asked us like how are things for you. It was kind of a side thing.

David Weiszfeld [27:51]: It was a record dominates the market. And so when people were saying the music industry is going down, it was automatically associated with the record labels. Eventually, some paper came out by saying "the live industry is booming" and so now artists must look at Live Industry Revenue for revenue and must see the record almost as a promotional tool for the live. And I guess now it's more of an even thing, where obviously people are making money again from them from the record side. We'll come back to Tech in a little while. So the Windish story at this point is in Chicago, it's stuffing up, it's going fast. From this, you move the company to L.A. and then obviously grow it again. And there is the M&A with Paradigm. What made you move to L.A. from Chicago?

Tom Windish [28:38]: Before we opened in L.A., we opened a New York office. Our office there was basically one agent. He'd been with another agency for a long time and then finally decided to join us. His name is Steve Goodgold. He's still works at Paradigm. Great agent, great guy. And the first two years that we had this New York office, it was in the basement of his townhouse in New Jersey. And he would go into the city a bunch of days of the week to meet people. But mostly worked down there, just do an agent job. Then, ultimately, we opened a small office in New York and that grew. And I'm not sure how many years we had that before we opened L.A. but it was you know a number of years. And I started spending the winters in L.A. because the weather in Chicago is not good in the winter. I didn't really know much about L.A. To be honest. I had not spent much time there at all. I thought "Well I can escape the cold. And also I can go meet people that are kind of hard to pin down when you go to L.A. on a trip for three or four days". So I did that for one month the first year. The second year, I did it for two months. The third year, I did it for three months. And then, I think it was the end of the third year, I decided "I'm just gonna stay here". I bought a house, I lived in it and that was the office.  And then later, one agent came down and worked there with me. I was still living in the house. And then we started adding more employees to that office. And all the other offices, as well as the work, demanded.

David Weiszfeld [30:37]: So you were living at the L.A. office and the New York guy was living in the New Jersey office.

Tom Windish [30:46]: Yeah. Very organic. Looking back on it all, it seems funny and ragtag, but at the time it just felt like the right thing to do. And the way we're gonna do it or something. We never had very fancy offices — I wouldn't say they were fancy, even at the end — until much later, when we had cool offices.

David Weiszfeld [31:18]: The last one I went to before the merger with Paradigm. The Windish office next to Silver Lake I guess. Yeah, that was a nice one, nothing fancy but like a nice, music-looking place. Fast forward to today. So people who don't know Paradigm existed before the merger with the Windish. AM Only as well was a pretty large agency in the US. The three companies are now merged into one. You guys are also partners with Coda in the UK. Just for people who don't know, could you explain a little bit what is Paradigm today and how you guys operate?

Tom Windish [31:54]: So there's even more than that. I think, about 15 years ago, they were a film-TV agency in Beverly Hills, in L.A. I'm not sure when they start, a long time ago, 20 years ago or something. And about 13 years ago, they acquired an agency called Monterey Peninsula Artists". It had similar DNA to ours, to Windish agency I'd say.  It was these two guys, who had been at a major agency, in L.A., who decided "we're leaving, we move in Monterrey, California and we're going to start our company. And everyone thought they were nuts. They went up there and basically became the best independent agency in the business.

David Weiszfeld [32:50]: For people who don't know Monterey is like a couple of hours north from L.A., it's a little town facing the ocean, famous for like the fog and views and stuff. It's not at all the music place or large city at all.

Tom Windish [33:06]: I think it's five hours north of L.A., not just a couple. It's very remote. It's like two or three hours south of San Francisco. It's not really like a venue where bands play at, regularly. So yeah very remote. And they just decided "we're going to move there. It's a beautiful place". But they kind of started their company from the ground up. With some similarities to the way we did. And they became a great independent agency that was then acquired by Paradigm. Then Paradigm acquired another agency in New York called "Little Big Man" which was started by this agent Marty Diamond. Who again started it in somewhat similar ways: it was in his apartment. It was just him and a few people, and he would sign all these bands when people didn't know who they were. You know, like Coldplay and Ed Sheeran and loads of other artists. And he grew that company to one of the best independent agencies. And then that was acquired by Paradigm. With both of them, when they acquired it, they would always kind of do a merger first, like a smaller thing. It would be Little Big Man in association with Paradigm. Monterey Peninsula associate with Paradigm. And for many years, they would work together, and do more and more and more stuff together, and then change the name. Kind of like when the whole world was like "Well I was wondering when that was going to happen". Then they went into a partnership with AM Only which was one of the best DJ agencies in the United States, probably the best. Again, started very similar roots by the main guy Paul Morris, in the back of a record shop booking Tiestö with one employee. That employee was also a DJ, a client of the agency and that agency became a huge, fantastic company. And then they started doing some things in the U.K. They did a partnership with Coda Agency. Another very very strong independent started from the ground up as well. They've also done a deal with X-Ray Touring in the U.K. And then, they did a deal with us, where it was Windish in association with Paradigm, and slowly they would fold in those companies entirely. You know Monterey and a Little Big Man just became Paradigm. And slowly that happened with the other ones, not Coda or X-Ray. They've also acquired roots blues agency in Chicago named Monterey International who's now called Paradigm, they acquired a country agency in Nashville. So there's been a lot of acquisitions of independent agencies. And I'd say, all the people who founded those agencies share similarities to what I had at Windish. At one time they were all sort of like an underdog or outside of the big company thing, which I think sort of drives a certain culture within the company. Windish changed its name to Paradigm three or four years ago and it's just been off to the races. I decided that I needed to join a bigger agency many years ago because we had these artists that were getting to kind of superstar level. And the things that they required from an agency were evolving. When I started it was just looking, and as time passed it became more and more about more services, the brand partnerships, being able to help with content like film or video, and then also global. So a lot of artists want to be booked by one company for the world. And Windish shared about one hundred fifty artists with Coda before we had anything to do with them officially. So they were very much like a natural partner of ours. We also had some artists with X-Ray. So, it's nice to be able to offer a worldwide service. We don't really demand it or push it if it doesn't make sense. But sometimes it does. I think we share four hundred artists with Coda or something like that. I'd say it's a little bit easier to develop the artist internationally, globally, when it's one agency for the world. And these days, the way artists are developing, in general, is internationally first. Because of the way streaming exists. The people who are streaming — lots of artists that I see live in London, L.A., New York, Sydney, and a few other places — but it's not limited to one country. Nearly as often as it used to be. So having an international partner makes things a lot easier. We might be talking about whether we're gonna do New York and London on the first phone call. That's very different than the way it was 10 or 15 years ago. Back then, you would develop in one part of one country. And then ultimately develop that country, and spread out from there.

David Weiszfeld [39:26]: The way music travels extremely fast today. Except if you're singing in French or you sing in German or some non-English language. But if you sing in English, you're from Australia, the US, and London, or the UK, or Canada, you think of those markets as your domestic live markets. The media, even the web media, are not really local based. There are still like Line of Best Fit from the UK. But the biggest online media, just have international clout. And an English reader or Australian reader, U.S. readers going to read the same blog reviews. People are going to listen to the same playlist. Spotify's RapCaviar or Mint (because you were speaking about electronic) is not only listened to by US people.  Hot 97 for hip hop in New York it literally just listened to ninety-five percent by people in New York State. The RapCaviar which is the Hot 97 of playlists, I would say, it's probably 50 percent non-American. And that's a huge shift. So a great segway. You actually started to talk about tech, so I guess we can just kind of wrap up the interview on that. A lot of people assume technical changes have affected the recording industry a lot more than the live industry. We're talking about streaming. We're talking about artists-fans interactions. But in the world of the live industry, it's actually very very true. We could talk about scalpers and digital tickets, and using Blockchain, and stuff to track tickets and avoid scalping. We could talk about of course CRM, and how artists can put shows on sales directly with fans. With pre-sales with the platforms and so forth. There is the obvious Fortnite-, Marshmello-, digitalization of events that is a hot topic. Would you say that tech has impacted the live? And then, maybe, obviously, because it had, is there like the number one thing you guys are thinking about? Positive challenges and positive things to do. Or actually, maybe things that you were kind of looking with an eye like that could actually hurt our business a little bit?

Tom Windish [41:34]: I guess the Holy Grail with Tech and touring would be to figure out what size venues the artists could play when they do the shows. And how much you could charge for the ticket price. The reality with that is that there’s not enough venues in the world right now to service the number of artists that can fill them. I'd say. There's been a democratization, a shift, where there's a lot of artists that can sell 300 tickets, 500 tickets, 1000 tickets, 2000 tickets — a lot more than there used to be. But there's not that many more venues than there were 20 years ago. Bands play the same places. I know, there's some exceptions. But in general, there's not that many more places. And one of the repercussions of that is that the venues get booked up really far in advance. 9 months, 10 months and the music — I have no idea how it's going to be received for the show that's 9 or 10 months in advance. Often the music's not even out yet! So there's still a lot of sort of gut instinct going on. More than I'd like — and maybe someone will figure it out someday, I don’t know. The way tech has influenced it...I mean the big one is through Spotify and the ease of uploading music to the Internet. Before there were these gatekeepers that had very solid strong high gates. Because without them, if you didn't have the money to print a vinyl or C.D., you couldn't put it out and then if you could afford that, you couldn't distribute it. It wasn't in shops and you needed money to get in the press and stuff, and to have people know where you were, and then get on the radio. That's all completely changed. You can now put up your music and if people like it, they can click a button and tell all their friends on all their social networks immediately that they like it, and they should listen to it. And those people can click that, that thing and listen to it. And then it can just feed itself very quickly: that happens all the time. I think that's a wonderful wonderful thing. I mean another way tech has influenced it is that you can make a really good sounding record on your laptop. You don't need to go into an expensive fancy studio to make a record. You do it in your bedroom or with a limited amount of recording equipment hooked up to your laptop. And again you hit the button and you can put it on the internet for everyone to hear it. And I think that's a wonderful thing. Stuff like — like you were saying — selling tickets directly to the fans: I think it's a fantastic thing. It's uncommon in the United States because of the way businesses are set up and the rules and regulations that we do and don't have. I wish that when I put a show on sale I could tell how many people want to buy a ticket and then just sell it to them. Instead of what we had 20 years ago, where it was "hey, tickets for this show we're going to go on sale on Friday at 10 a.m". That's just so ridiculous and outdated. Most people I know that want to buy a ticket are at school or at work. And then the ones who do get to go and try that, they go and there’s no tickets available. They've already been sold and bought up by scalpers and the bots and all this stuff. And that's been evolving but — to me — not nearly fast enough.

David Weiszfeld [46:02]: It's funny, the way you say it. It's a double thing. It's either you're putting your show on sale and you're actually selling it out much quicker than you anticipated. But maybe the band doesn't even have a second day in the market. So you ended up selling 2k where you could have sold like 5k. The other thing is: sometimes you overestimate demand and you end up with an empty venue because it's a very hard 10 months in advance. And then the third challenge is: sometimes you actually have the right venue for the right band. But the day you put it on sale, bots buy it. And so the real fans are kind of locked out and they have to go to bad websites to get overcharged for it. And getting the right ticket in the hands of the right fans. At the right time. Estimating the venue. All of these are still up in the air and the Tech hasn't really solved that at all. There is a couple of shows I've seen in Europe, where the band is trying to gauge how much they're going to sell. So they do like a presale for fans, but they don't announce the venue. And so that allows them to say "well if fans are going to buy 10 percent of a venue like the first 48 hours, let's just put it on sale and say — we play in London on April 17th". If you're a fan, you don't really care where they're going to play, you just want to see them. And then depending on how that pre-buy goes, you choose the venue accordingly. But you need to control your ticketing. You need to control your inventory. You need to be able to put tickets on sale outside of digital platforms, like ticketing platforms. And once you have that quota, you have to work with them to put it back in the system so they can get scanned at the entrance. That's a big technical challenge. I don't want to take too much of your time and I know you actually had to leave 3 minutes ago. Last two questions before we go. The first one is a little bit long, depending on how you want to take it. Second one is very short. First one is: if you had to meet the 19-year-old Tom what would you say? Are there any words of wisdom that you felt you would have needed or lacked when you started this thing? What would you say the 19-year-old Tom?

Tom Windish [48:05]: I mean, seeking out mentors would be a great thing for a 19-year-old to do. I’ve sort of gotten to where I'd gotten by hustling, also. But also asking people for help or their advice or opinion and how they would do things. As it relates to situations that my clients are in. And what venue or, or whatever. There's so much material you can read and listen to on the Internet. I still read and lists do tons and tons and tons of stuff. When I was 19, that barely existed. And you can learn so much about how people have done things. And I would recommend doing that I still like I enjoy it. That's why I do it. I love hearing people's stories both in music and in other areas. I also think that if you wanted to get into music specifically, obviously,  consume tons of music, go to tons of shows. Big ones, small ones. I never went on tour with a band but if you wanted to be an agent I'd recommend doing that. And beyond the things that are related to just music (And this kind of goes along with what I was saying before'), the demands of an agent now are much different than they were. It's not just about touring. So I would really recommend that 19-year-old sort of "soak up life! And go, and do, and see, and talk to as many people as you possibly can in all areas. And that will influence and then help you immensely. If you're doing like a narrower scope later on. Go see art, read literature, listen to politics, read the newspaper, travel the world, go meet people. How you pay for all this? I don't know. But I think for some people there, the hurdles are not that high. It can be done. I had a band from Japan who had a tour, making five hundred dollars a night, opening for someone. And it was a great opportunity; and they really didn't have much money. And they figured out, they did this tour is like 30 shows, and they lost two thousand dollars doing it, which is not a lot in the grand scheme of things. They bought a van at the beginning of the tour and they sold it at the end for just a little bit less than they paid for it. And they did a lot of other things that were crafty and probably very uncomfortable. But they're frugal and I have other bands who've been in the same situation, get offered a tour for five hundred dollars a night. And they spend forty-fifty thousand dollars doing that. They're not really making much money. I guess I'd encourage 19-year-olds who are not musicians but are looking to get into the business to sort of approach life the same way, frugally, and do as much as possible. Because the more experience you have and the broader your palette — the better off you're gonna be and the more well-rounded your advice and approach on things is gonna be. With shows: maybe the musician should play at an art gallery for the first show or something, or a museum, or some park or something. And if you're just thinking about "everybody plays at La Scala in London the third time they play London". You need to think beyond what people have been doing for the last 10 to 20 years. That will make you a more valuable member of the team.

David Weiszfeld [52:41]: We always see the same shows, the same marketing, stunts or plots, the same  "on sale" "presale" announced kind of strategies. And then, every once in a while, some artist just does the complete opposite than everybody else, and usually, they're the ones that get the most attention regardless of the music. Every year, there's one artist that just takes everybody else with a counterintuitive marketing plot or Live set. I saw a show recently where the artist is in the center, and everybody's kind of participating around. And you can see that artist 20 times, the day you see this one is completely refreshed. Actually, so I’ve seen Four Tet in L.A which is one of the artists that is going through you guys, he had this center stage with neons all around, and I guess most people who go see Four Tet today have probably seen Four Tet once. He has such a big fan base that people just keep going. And that felt like the first show I ever been to and it's definitely not the first show I've been to. So yeah keep reinventing yourself as well. Before I let you go, do you have new music, podcast or book recommendation?

Tom Windish [53:58]: I'm obsessed with a lot of music. I'm reading this book right now called "Normal People" that I heard about from Daniel Glass, that I really like. It's written by an Irish author. It's a good read. Hard to put down. I haven't finished yet. I felt like the ending or not. I listened to a bunch of Freakonomics episodes and podcasts last night when I was driving back from Coachella and it was all about the creative process. I think it's an incredible time in the world today. There's so much great art and messages being spread. I'm really excited to just be in a position where I can help people, just have a louder voice. I'm finding music from all over the place, and lots of other people are finding it too, and are buying tickets to see it, and are supporting them. And these people are putting on incredible shows and participating in festivals, and all sorts of things. I love hearing music that no one's ever conceived of: those notes and melodies and the type of voice being combined. And there's more bizarre and amazing stuff happening there than ever. And then when you hear it, it just sounds like the most obvious greatest thing. I love that. And like Khruangbin — I love that band. They're really really popular, and 10-15 years ago, no one ever would have said that band is gonna be huge. One of the things that excite me most is seeing bands that the traditional music industry would have always said: "that band will never be huge". Seeing them be huge. Like we're bound by these rules, and norms, and notions that really don't have much basis in reality. I love helping to break those rules and norms and show the world that they're wrong. I've been booking French hip hop artists in America with great success, and it's not just French people go into these shows. Thousands of people turn up without the support of record companies. I think that's awesome. I've been booking artists from Africa. I've been booking like neoclassical artists. With all of them, the music blows me away. It blows my mind. And it's wonderful that lots and lots of people are feeling the same thing I am. Because in the old days, people wouldn't have bought tickets to see them. They wouldn't have bought their records either. And now, we're in an ecosystem where it's thriving to do what you want to do, or what feels natural, what feels right, what feels you. And I encourage artists to spend time figuring that out. And not comparing themselves to others, and saying "if we just got this festival or this brand partnership we would be popular". I don't think there's any truth to that. I think if you write music that you love, that's how you have the highest chance of success, of being discovered. If you're truly authentic if you are vulnerable. And it's a wonderful thing.

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David Weiszfeld

Founder & CEO, Soundcharts.com & bsharp.biz

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