Spotlight On Podcast — Looking Back at Year One (2020)
At the five-year mark, we revisit our most-listened-to episodes from 2020, featuring Joe Satriani speaking candidly from his home studio, Jorma and Vanessa Kaukonen re-imagining music community, and eight other stories that set the blueprint for the hundreds that followed.
Running a podcast means always looking forward. Next week's guest needs to be booked, next month’s schedule needs to be planned, and research never ends. But as Spotlight On marks its fifth anniversary, I am making time to look back, if only to marvel at the body of work. When I am done with this series of pieces, we will have examined each of the podcast’s first five years. For now, we start at the beginning.
Listening back to the conversations from 2020, recorded while we were all trying to make sense of the pandemic, I kept noticing ideas and questions that would shape everything that followed. The top ten most-listened episodes of that year, detailed below, illustrate the point.
Joe Satriani
Joe Satriani spoke with me from his home studio during lockdown, and that episode became our most listened-to conversation of 2020. At first, this made me self-conscious as we have since built our reputation featuring artists outside the mainstream. But Joe brought such honesty to our discussion about creative life that he unknowingly helped define what the show could become.
Our talk wandered far from the usual promotional circuit topics. I enjoyed listening to him talk about his experience reading Dylan Jones' book David Bowie: The Oral History. "I found it terrifying," he said. "I could not have lasted in all of that. I cannot imagine being with the one you are with and saying to her as you enter a room, 'By the way, we are not talking to that one; we are talking to him. He is useful.'" That raw honesty about the compromises facing artists, who now must serve as marketers, "content creators," small businesspeople, and more, resonated through many conversations to follow.
Jorma & Vanessa Kaukonen
The conversation with Jorma Kaukonen (of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna) and his wife Vanessa showed how artists build lasting legacies beyond recordings and performances. At their Fur Peace Ranch in Southeast Ohio, where they "grow guitar players," they created not just a music school but a genuine community. Master musicians teach aspiring players from around the world. When the pandemic struck, they adapted, streaming concerts from their broadcast-ready performance space, showing how musical connections transcend physical barriers.
Amongst other topics, Jorma shared thoughts and stories about the revered bluesman, Reverend Gary Davis. He saw in Davis not just a musical mentor but someone who radiated profound joy despite tremendous adversity. "There was just something so incredibly powerful about what I perceived as his love of life," Jorma told me. "And sharing it with a world that had to be another galaxy from the one he grew up with in the Carolinas."
Danny Scher
Concert impresario Danny Scher's story opened a window into music history and entrepreneurial spirit. In 1968, at 16 years old, he booked Thelonious Monk to play his high school auditorium. His account of the logistics included convincing skeptical school administrators and promoting the show across affluent white and working-class Black communities. His story showed how the fundamentals of concert promotion remain unchanged even as the industry evolves: vision, hustle, and bringing people together.
Matt Watts
Matt Watts brought a unique perspective as a musician in The Starting Line and marketing executive at Fender (he has since moved on to a leadership role at Vans). His ability to navigate the creative and business worlds sparked a fascinating discussion about authenticity in the music industry. "I think you have got to find the right way to strike that balance," Matt explained, reflecting on his parallel careers. "The band experience of touring for 10 plus years opened up a lot of doors [in the business]. And I was always the business guy in the band. I just took a natural liking to either how the business operated or what could be improved upon. Every chance I got, I would meet with promoters or managers or label people and just ask them questions." His practical approach to building a sustainable career while maintaining artistic integrity became a recurring topic in our discussions with artists across genres and career stages.
David Goldberg
David Goldberg shared stories from the dawn of online ticketing that still resonate today. As head of mergers and acquisitions at Ticketmaster during its transformative years, he witnessed the company's digital evolution firsthand. His story about the first-ever online ticket sale through AOL captured a pivotal moment. The team called their first online customer to ask why he bought digitally. The answer? "I do not like dealing with people." That response perfectly captured how technology reshapes not just business but human behavior—and perhaps speaks to the alienation aggravated by the current state of our online platforms.
Cejih Yung
Cejih Yung brought a different perspective as the sports world grappled with the unprecedented postponement of the 2020 Olympics, which seemed unthinkable until it happened. As founder of CG Sports Management, representing Olympic and Paralympic athletes, he scrambled to help elite athletes maintain their training despite widespread facility closures. "These athletes were nomads trying to train wherever they could," Cejih recalled. "At one point, we were calling high-income individuals who had pools in their homes to see if our Olympic swimmers could go and train there. That is how desperate it got." His story illuminated the pandemic's profound impact on athletes who had trained their entire lives for a moment suddenly in doubt.
Andrew Loog Oldham
Andrew Loog Oldham's presence on the show was a special treat for someone like me, a lifelong Rolling Stones fan and student of the history of the music business. The visionary who discovered, managed, and produced the Stones from 1963 to 1967 shaped their music and invented modern artist development by positioning the band as the anti-Beatles. A teenage prodigy who apprenticed with fashion designer Mary Quant and worked briefly with Beatles manager Brian Epstein, Andrew recognized the Stones could embody a darker, more dangerous alternative to the clean-cut Fab Four. He went on to found Immediate Records, home to Small Faces, Nice, and other important artists.
Andrew brought his sharp wit and unvarnished insight to every topic we discussed. When I asked about managing young bands today, he paused before answering, “The music business was different then. We did not have to pretend to care about the artists’ feelings. Now, that is all anyone talks about.” Andrew witnessed the birth of the modern music industry and helped create it, pioneering strategies for artist image-making and media engagement that influence the business today.
Rishi Dhir
In the late 1990s, Montreal bustled with indie bands playing British-influenced rock. While many musicians struggle with authenticity, Rishi Dhir confronted that challenge at a deeper cultural level. Fronting his early bands, he worked hard to fit that scene, consciously distancing himself from his Indian heritage. He turned down invitations to play traditional music with family members. He avoided discussing his background in interviews. He kept his two worlds firmly separated.
A 1998 family trip to India changed all that. "When I was a teenager, I rejected my Indian heritage and culture. I was like, 'This is not cool. I do not want any part of this,'" Rishi shared. "It is not something I ever thought about until February 2, 1998. We went on a family trip to India... It was really on that trip that I opened my eyes to my heritage and who I was." The experience pushed him to study sitar with the discipline he had previously reserved for rock guitar. His band Elephant Stone emerged from this synthesis—psychedelic rock incorporating Indian classical elements not as exotic flavoring but as fundamental building blocks. On albums like Ship of Fools and Hollow, ragas interweave with rock rhythms, while Dhir's lyrics explore cultural displacement and belonging.
Ben Lovett
Ben Lovett demonstrated in our first episode how artistic vision extends far beyond the stage and is applied to the business world, a topic I have long been interested in. Though known for his role in Mumford & Sons, our conversation focused on his work developing music venues and fostering creative communities. His projects in London and Huntsville, Alabama, revealed how successful music ventures grow from understanding community needs. He spoke about Omeara, his 320-capacity London venue designed from an artist's perspective, with multiple, artist-friendly green room spaces and high-end production capabilities. "I think objectively, it is the No. 1 venue of its size in London," Ben told me. His philosophy of creating spaces that serve both artists and audiences while maintaining control over ticketing and fan experience was a precursor for many later discussions on the podcast about the future of live music.
Eric Fuller
Eric Fuller gave us an analysis of the live entertainment ecosystem during the depths of COVID. A veteran industry consultant and observer of the ticketing business, Eric wrote an influential piece using StubHub's pandemic-related challenges to examine the fundamental structures of live entertainment. Our conversation expanded beyond StubHub to explore how trust relationships between stakeholders—venues, promoters, artists, ticketing companies, and fans - form the foundation of the live entertainment economy. It is a trust that is often shaky, at best.
"All business is about trust,” Eric explained. “There is a trust between the merchant and the consumer; there is a trust between the partners and the businesses; there is a trust between the merchant and its suppliers. And that trust is founded on one simple principle: you will do what you say you will do." His insights into how the secondary market evolved from street corner transactions to a legitimate part of the entertainment economy and his thoughts on how the pandemic might force a rethinking of traditional business models offered valuable perspective on an industry at a crossroads, even if, with the benefit of hindsight, many of his predictions turned out to be off.
These conversations from COVID-ravaged 2020 revealed a lot about adaptability and resilience. Our guests found remarkable ways to connect with audiences during an unprecedented shutdown of live entertainment. The value of community emerged again and again, from Ben Lovett's vision for nurturing local music scenes to the Kaukonens' dedication to getting music to the people.
As Andrew Loog Oldham put it, "The song is the living common denominator." Whether discussing ticket sales, venue development, or artistic expression, everything returned to creating meaningful connections between artists and audiences, something which has guided my own path in the music business.
Those early conversations helped shape what Spotlight On would become, setting a foundation for hundreds more discussions that would and will still follow. They captured a volatile moment of transition in music, entertainment, and life itself as the pandemic forced everyone to pause and reconsider fundamental assumptions about how we create, share, and experience art. Most importantly, they confirmed my deepest hope: that others shared my fascination with the intersection of art, commerce, and community, something we are still proving every Thursday with every new episode.
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