Colby Colb Tyner has always been one of my favorite industry people. I’ve seen his growth over the years and we have talked about the ups and downs of the industry on many occasions. He is well deserving of his current position at Radio One as the VP of Programming and I admire his work ethic. Manning many stations he still finds time to do his podcast BackStory which consist mostly of old interviews that he transferred from cassette to digital. Here we honor him with the Executive of the Year Award for his contributions to Radio One’s success and we get to see a more personal side of perspective of him
KEVIN ROSS: (Zoom) I see you have a lot of label plaques on your wall. I have lost most of mines
COLBY COLB: Yeah, I’m a collector. That’s why I’m able to do that podcast because I saved everything that I did, I just saved it. So I was able to have all this archive of stuff of interesting content from a time when many of the artists were just beginning. Do you know what I’m saying? So that was like pretty cool that you know, I was able to do that, and have it, and then use it.
How did you transcribe the tapes to digital?
Ah, that was easy. Like when I was out of work in 2008 when we had the great recession, I had you know about like 10 boxes of tapes; and I have a tape recorder, and it will be something like i-Rig now, but whatever it was at the time, you know, you plug it into the back of the tape deck, and then it has a USB on the other side, and then it just you load it right into your computer and just record, but it’s painstaking because you have to kind of like go through every tape. I wasn’t working so I spent six months doing it, and then I had it on a hard drive and just didn’t really do anything with it. And then I happen to see Combat Jack who did this amazing podcast about Chris Lighty’s life and you know, the information around his death, and just a little bit of his story. And, you know, I and Chris Lighty are the same age, so we kind of came up together. So I thought I knew a lot about him, but I learned more about him.
And there was this one interview that they had done with Fat Joe, in that podcast; and he was just talking about, it was a great story of, you know, Joe was like, basically a criminal in the streets. And Chris Lighty had to go to the streets to find him to get him to do a record deal and get off the streets. He literally saved fat Joe’s life. And they really combat Jack did a great job of explaining that moment. And I was like, man, I got all of this audio from all these people in those days. You know, like I’m gonna drop Eazy E, because I don’t ever see anything on Eazy E, but I had an interview with him a few months before he died.
Isn’t Podcasting something that Radio One is doing with a lot of the jocks? I don’t know about the programmers, but I thought I was reading someplace where that is a part of the job description for the corporation.
Well, it just depends, everybody’s got a different situation or system in place. And we’re very early into it, but we have some of our stations and our shows where a talent has podcasts that we do work in conjunction with the shows. We had a show that’s no longer with the company, but it was on one of our pop stations, and they had a really good podcast. I mean, they had a lot of numbers for that. But again, it’s a non-African American audience, you know, that they’re reaching, but I still think it’s the Wild, Wild West. I know a lot of people are doing stuff with it. And most of the stuff that you put out doesn’t do anything. It’s like literally a one-percenter game and 1% becomes, you know, massive.
But I’ve sort of mentored a lot of podcasters; because a lot of people had come to me because I had a podcast. And, you know, I would just kind of help them with just the structural part of it. And so I’m anxious to see what we look like in five years, but you know, I think it’s exciting.
Okay. Um, another question, do you listen to Joe Budden? Have you ever checked out his show?
Yeah, I know Joe. I have known Joe for 20 years.
He recently did a piece, which I thought was really interesting. He was talking about how the record labels are connected to social media, and how you know that trend is gonna continue even though they may not like each other at times, they will marry an effort to bring music to the listeners. And this podcast was probably like an hour-long, and he did not mention radio one time in the process. What do you think about where radio is right now concerning so many other outlets? I mean, it’s, uh, you know, it’s really a broadcast industry that extends, you know, to audiobooks, to podcasting, voiceover, to YouTube. I mean, you got a lot of people on YouTube who are, I was telling somebody the other day, I don’t get it, absolutely horrible. They do shows about, you know, dedicated to the industry. They talk about behind the scenes things, but they have absolutely no skill sets, no talent and they are making thousands of dollars a month. And I cannot figure out I’ve tried, but I stopped. I cannot figure out why, and maybe you said it earlier about black people not really being into the whole podcast industry, why? We’ll sit here and wait for another lateral radio gig instead of creating an opportunity for ourselves online that’s wide open right now.
The answer to your initial part of the question; we all have recognized that there are more competitors to the radio. I mean, it’s not what it was, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago, where radio was the king. You know, if you wanted to be a star, you have to be on the radio, but the same adage of if you want to ascend from regular artists that may get five to 10 grand a show to $100,000 artists that you know, selling millions, usually radio is the piece that you know, triggers that part of the superstar. I don’t want to call everybody a superstar because they’re not all superstars, but that radio helps with the growth because of the exposure. But I will tell you this Kevin Ross, you can quote me on this is that, I think that the COVID really showed the importance of radio to the music business because everything was shut down, but radio was not shut down. So this has been the most competitive year from a label perspective in regards to material given to us in urban AC and mainstream than We have had in years. There is so much music coming at us, because guess what, they need us to play it so that people can hear it, and they can start jamming it, and streaming it, and growing the streaming, right?
So you know, we still play our part in regards to building stars in the format. And I think we have to do a better job because we’ve built so many stars, but they don’t necessarily do anything for radio, right? So we’ve got to do a better job cultivating stars, and working with stars because I think it’s going to be a coexistence relationship; and if not, you are right. If you want to do your own thing, you should be able to do it. If you’re out of work, and you can’t find a job, and you have a great idea, do a podcast, you never know what’s going to happen.
You know, a couple of guys from Philly that I’ve known a long time, you know, street guys. one used to be a recording artist, the other one was literally in jail for most of his life. And they would do these really cool videos on Instagram. And they started a podcast, and I was helping them out early on; because they just were trying to figure the whole podcast thing out, and they had a big social media following. They had no filter, I was actually trying to do something on the radio with them a couple of years ago, but there was just no I couldn’t do it. They’re just not the kind of people you could put on the radio, it just wasn’t gonna work. They were not going to be able to filter themselves down, they had to be authentic to who they were. And they started doing this podcast, and it just exploded because they both have huge social media footprints, and then their videos together, which is really funny and interesting. And they ended up signing a multimillion-dollar deal with a podcasting company. Had it not been a podcast, they’ve only been a podcast for eight months and they got that deal because they grew so quickly. So you know, if you got a great idea, or a great concept, you should just put it out into the universe and see what happens. You know, like, I think what I offer in my podcast; I did it because I knew it was different. And I’m not surprised that, I mean, I’m surprised that other people like me in the business aren’t doing the same thing. But most of our people don’t save stuff, they don’t, they don’t hold onto things, they don’t have audio for a prominent personality.
But at the end of the day, man, you know, to your initial point, I know I’m long-winded on it is that you have to if you have an idea, you know, there’s not always going to be a place for you to go in like a corporate radio structure. But we’re always looking for talent; and if you’ve got the talent and you show the world, what you can do, that’s a great resume to get a job down the line, and then you can still do your podcasts. You can still do your podcast, and then you do this other thing, and you get multiple streams of revenue. But a lot of people don’t necessarily think like that, or they’re waiting on the job. And the job is tough right now. It’s hard to, there’s not a lot of opportunities in this in anything. The internet has changed everything.
Well, I’ve been an entrepreneur for 25 years, so perhaps we see things differently in that sense. But I know that if you create an opportunity, it could go much further than sitting around waiting for a job. And I constantly tell people that in the 25 years I’ve been doing The Industry Dot Biz, I can tell you with certainty that the people who end up dying, or get sick, it’s always the same set of circumstances. They are waiting to get back in. They’ve been out for a minute, nobody’s returning their calls. They’re frustrated, and they get depressed, and they get sick, and they die. It’s like 99.9% of the people.
But you just got to have, and it’s not just radio people as people in general; like people are very scared and comfortable. They don’t like change. Most people are like that. It’s a very small group of people that will, you know, and people want the comfort of a job. And I understand that the comfort of a job is great, you know, you just have that peace of mind that you have the money coming in. But what I’ve always recognized and I’ve been out a couple of times in my career, is that the first thing you do, and I tell this to anybody because I’ve returned all phone calls, and emails, and people out of work, I always make sure to at least give them a response. Because I remember when I was out of work and I know people and people didn’t call me back, you know what I mean?
Of course. I’ve been there once in my 20s and that was all it took.
And the day I got a job everybody calling.
Yep, Where have you been? I have been trying to reach you all that BS (lol)
Hey, like, bro, my phone number Kevin has never changed. It has been the same number for almost 30 years, right? So like my number didn’t change bro, you changed. But anyway, going back to it is that you got to figure out the first thing you should do, and this is good that we’re talking about it because we got a lot of friends that aren’t working right now, and you know, and unfortunately not just radio just in general. The COVID really, radio was already going through this, but COVID is really like affecting everybody. Right? So, you know, I think the first thing you have to do when you’re in that situation is lean on your creative, your inner creative part. What is it that you like to do that makes you happy, and you should just go ahead and do it, and don’t worry about anybody with no job.
You reinvent yourself.
Yeah, yeah, but you kind of got to do that all the time. I teach my daughter the same thing. Like, you’re like, this is nice that you were in high school was nice, but like, you’re going to get to college, and then you’re going to get to after college, and like every couple years is changing. You know what else, Kevin? Everything because technology is changing much quicker than it did for our parents. Our parents could roll out for 40 years and work somewhere. My mom worked at Temple University for 40 years, right? You know,
