Mike Curb - Curb Records Founder, Grammy Winner & Fmr Acting Governor of California | 60 Years Running the Same Company and He Still Won't Sell

You started this label at 18, you're 81, you're still the chairman, and you've never sold. Why? I don't wanna get fired. At least if you own your own company, that's pretty important. When I look at your story, you are the example of somebody who has just stayed in the game for as long as possible. Was that always just the way you were? I'm a Capricorn. I tend to be very focused on what I do each day and also our long-term plan. Today's guest is Mike Kerb, entrepreneur, record producer, songwriter, and former Lieutenant Governor of California. After founding Kerb Records at just 18 years old, he built one of the most successful independent record labels in America while discovering and developing generations of iconic artists. In this conversation, he shares the principles behind building a lasting business, staying focused, and creating long-term success. How do you know what's going to work? I wish that I could tell you that I have the ability to do exactly what you said, but to me, the area that helped me the most was learning to produce records. My fitness pal is a success story partner. Now here's something I've noticed after interviewing hundreds of founders, the ones that are performing at the highest level, the ones that are truly winning, they aren't just optimizing their business or their calendar or their team, they're paying attention to what they eat. And the ones who aren't paying attention, they're usually the first ones to burn out. And that pattern is consistent enough that it got me thinking about my own nutrition, Not whether I was eating well, but whether I actually knew what the big picture looked like. 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So just walk me through why at 81 you are still the chairman and you've never sold this label. Well, first of all, I don't want to get fired. So at least if you own your own company... In this day and age, that's pretty important. I mean, it's the number of people who have to go to a website every morning with some of these tech companies, see if they even have a job. And I have members of my family who work for various tech companies and various other companies where they have to check every morning to see if they have a job. You know, and then when you read that some of these companies are in this AI now, like Meta, announced that they're going to get rid of 10% of their workhorse and turn it over to AI systems. That's an interesting time we're in. I mean, because, you know, I've spent time in government out in California. I was acting governor for about a year, but lieutenant governor for four years and senate president. And what's going on in the Silicon Valley right now, a lot of. A lot of fear because a lot of these young people didn't go to college. They went to college by going to the tech companies. And the tech companies do a great job of teaching quickly. And, of course, now suddenly... Because of AI, they see their jobs going away. It's created quite a bit of chaos in the Silicon Valley. And something that, of course, we don't have that. I mean, not that every business doesn't have some chaos, but our company, we've stayed away from terminating people. We've all experienced the new algorithms and how they affect our business. And sometimes it creates sales variations from year to year that are good, but we at the same time, We've been able to maintain our team of people. Some of our people have been together 30 or 40 years. Probably over half of our people at the company have been there at least 20 to 40 years. And that's a good thing. That's an incredible thing. I feel like even before AI, working for a company for 20 to 40 years is getting rarer and rarer. because of the company, but also I think because of people switch what they're focused on so quickly. I mean, when I look at your story, you are the example of somebody who has just stayed in the game. for as long as possible, and that's how you've been successful at almost everything you've ever done in your life. The mindset of sticking with it and focus, was that always just the way you were? Were you raised like that? Because that's like the common theme I see across all of your success. Well, I'm a Capricorn, so I tend to be very focused, I probably need to be a little less focused, but I tend to be very focused on what I do each day and also our long-term plan. Many of our competitors will sell different parts, you know, and early on when we started the company, There were certain things we had to co-venture or maybe not own and maybe even have to sell, but... for the last, I want to say 55 years, we've not sold anything. We've not sold. We, we, you, you read about various record companies selling a particular artist will hit and they'll sell that artist catalog to an investment group. And that's great, but it doesn't allow you to maintain your team. So by not selling our assets and by holding them together, uh, in my, you know, taking all the steps to continue moving our assets forward, we're also able to have a very stable workhorse. And I think, I mean, I love the team of people we have. I can't even think of one person that I wouldn't want, that I can't think of one person that I would want to lead the company. So it also creates, for example, COVID. We went through COVID and didn't miss a beat. People got their bonuses. They got their 401ks. They got their medical, their dental. Everything stayed as normal as we could keep it. And our foundation fed money. 95% of the people at the shelters in Nashville, Tennessee, we were able to bought 20,000 meals from Chick-fil-A and, you know, working with... with Second Harvest and working with the rescue, the rescumation, uh, and, and, and other, uh, homeless entities, we were able to, to feed, we believe 95% for the, for the two to three months that we thought the COVID was going to be two to three months. Little did, didn't know, did we? I think there's a lot of lessons in, in what you've built over your life, but, just the fact that you've continued for now over 60 years. So you are the longest running founder owner of a major relevant American record label. And I think that that's a beautiful mindset for anybody who's starting something. Because I think that that's, that is what, that's what the biggest predictor of success is. It's how long can you build this thing? How long can you surround yourself with the right people? Keep those people close. And then look at how healthy the business is on the other side of that mindset. But people don't know you and they don't know what you've built. I sort of alluded to it a little bit, but yeah. Walk me back to 18, you know, just a few years ago, like you said, 81 now, you started when you were 18. What prompted you? Like, what was the thing that made you want to start a record label way back then? Well, at the very, very start, I did momentarily have a job at Mercury Records, just a small job where I was like an assistant record producer. I did manage to get a job there when I was very young. I think I was about 18 then. And I had a little bit of success, but they closed the office and, in effect, terminated my job. And I thought, you know, what a shame. We're making progress here. Do I want to do that? And then I was offered a job at Capital. But I said to Capital, I said, would it be possible for me to... to kind of have my own label. And they said, well, you don't have any money. And I said, no, but if I could just have that imprint so I could put my band. I had a band, you know, like everybody. I had a band when I was in high school where I played piano and then we had a guitarist and a bass player and a drummer. And we played in fraternity parties, you know, at USC, UCLA, and the various... colleges in Southern California. And we played assemblies in our school. But I was anxious to record that band. And I had a really good version, kind of a pop rock version of a song called Apache with our band. And I wanted to put that out on my own label and... Thanks to Eddie Ray, but be stone and some very, very good people that there were at Capitol at the time. They allowed me to do that. And I didn't even know how to press a record at the time. I didn't know how to do the legal, uh, I didn't really know anything about it other than I had, I loved the history of music and I loved playing music. I didn't know where I fit into, you know, I was a songwriter, but I didn't know whether I was going to be an artist at a band. I didn't know whether I was, I just knew that I needed a place to put my music to get it out there to see if, if we could have some success. One of the songs I wrote called You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda, I met Bobby Darin, you know, the famous singer, in an elevator when I was in Capitol Records when I was very young. And we talked, and he invited me to his office, and I allowed him to publish the song And he took this song, You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda, he took it to the Gray Agency, and it became the song for their commercial. And it lasted for two or three years. And I made a little bit of money from that. And so I just gradually, then I was able to hire our first employee. And then I just gradually, over the years, grew it. You know, we've certainly had good years back then. There were good years and bad years. But I think that's the way you're, I think you're going to always see that in the record business. The tough thing about the record business, most companies, particularly public companies, they like to compare quarter one of 2026 with quarter one of 2025 and look for growth. Well, the record business, what do you do if your artists deliver in 2025 albums and then in 2026, yeah. don't deliver their homes, then your volume goes up or down. Well, a private company can survive that. But in a public company, it looks as though your earnings are going down from year to year, when in fact, it's really just the flow of product. And of course, with recording artists, they're human beings. You know, we're not in the business with widgets. We're in the business with artists who have a brain and a heart and creativity. And sometimes artists have been known to go for years without delivering a new album. And then all of a sudden, they deliver something great. And you have to provide that environment, that creative environment, that and you have to provide a business environment where they can do that, and many companies can do it, particularly the public companies. They have to hold these artists to their release dates, and that's a hard thing to do. It's a hard thing to do with reporting artists. You actually bring up a really interesting point. When you are trying to run a business with creatives, you're trying to, like you mentioned, in a public environment, you're trying to hit your quarterly earnings, and you're trying to appease the shareholders, the product, quote unquote, the product is creativity. And creativity doesn't always hit a quarterly earnings report, right? And that makes it very hard. So it's almost like the way that modern, especially public record labels, and anybody who's responsible for creative talent works, is somewhat at odds with how creatives work. are like, it's just the reality. It's not like you can just roll, you know, go to China and print out a hundred new, a hundred new singers. You can't do that. You have to, you have to find people that are truly gifted, but that's interesting. So then What allowed you, what allowed you, because I don't know anything about the record business. I know about different kinds of businesses, but I don't know anything about the record or the music business. But what allowed you to build something and find the right talent and take bets on people who are all creatives? And they all have their own personalities and they all have years where they don't go with creating great work and they have like a blockbuster year. What allowed you to find those people while still building a business around them? Well, first of all, as you mentioned earlier, I was very focused. So when I was very young, I mean, I would wake up in the morning early and go to bed real late. And all I thought about was music all day long and getting music out there. One of the most important things I would... teach or want to tell someone starting out, if you're independent, you have to remember that the major labels, the labels like Sony and Universal and Warner Brothers, the major labels are going to usually have the great big artists. So you need to find a niche to And the niche that we found was providing music for soundtracks. And we started there, you know, because we were out in Hollywood. Our office was on the Sunset Strip. So we were in Hollywood. And, of course, there were all kinds of movies. Now, we weren't going to get our music in A movies initially. A lot of the movies were like, you know, beach party movies, motorcycle music. Movies, you know, movies. Roger Corman was the big producer for those movies, but he liked the music I was doing. I did the music for a short called Skater Dater that was nominated for Academy Award and won the Acon Film Festival. And I did that about a year or so after I started my company. I was a couple of producers from a couple of students, graduate students from UCLA put the movie together and that the music played off. I was putting kind of West Coast rock and roll music. in the short film, and it worked, and it caught the attention of Roger Corman, and he engaged me to do the music for the Wild Angels, which starred Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra, and his B movies were really B-plus movies, and he was putting, you know, they would put Fabian and Annette Food and Shell Ho, and whoever was hot at the time, they would put... these stars in the movie, but this particular movie, The Wild Angels, had Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. And the music really worked. It was real strong West Coast rock and roll, fuzzstone guitars. But we had a big hit single on the Billboard chart called Blues Theme. named after Blues, which was the character Peter Fonda played. And that record, and then some of the other music, the Wild Angels theme got picked up by the Ventures, who were a Hall of Fame rock and roll band. So it started to grow. And then along the way, we signed artists. So we signed Linda Ronsted and the Stone Pony's back in 1966. And her early records were on my label. back then. And she was amazing because she could sing in fluent Spanish, but she wanted to have a pop record on one side of her single and a country on the other side. So it kind of pushed us a little bit into learning a little bit about country music. And, uh, yeah, And we started, you know, signing out of California and the Bakersfield group and groups. And we started getting involved with the Bakersfield artists out there. But Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Kay Adams. And, you know, we so we started we were kind of in that West Coast country that was kind of emerging. Even ironically, West Coast spiritual music was even growing a little bit. The churches, the particular church that I went to, you would have a CEO in the prayer group. You would have the CEO of major companies. in a prayer group with young people who were struggling with drug addiction or sexual identity issues and so forth, and seeing those type of churches were emerging on the West Coast, and probably throughout the country, but particularly on the West Coast in the 60s and going into the early 70s. And some of these artists like Larry Norman, second chapter of Acts, DeGarmo and Key, you know, Debbie Boone, who was You Light of My Life. You know, many people consider in the contemporary Christian genre that You Light of My Life by Debbie Boone was the first major hit for that genre. So we were just kind of looking for niches, whether it was contemporary Christian music that was really just starting back then in the late 60s or 70s, whether it was West Coast country mostly coming out of Bakersfield, like Kay Adams, and those type of artists, Buck Owens. At that time, we didn't have Buck and Merle sign, but over time, we did. Over time, we were able to sign both Buck Owens and Merle Hager. But those artists, we were finding niches. So it was West Coast Country, West Coast Scania Pre-Christian, West Coast Rock and Roll that we were putting into soundtracks for movies. And then we would do it very inexpensively And then we would have the soundtrack album on our record label. So like in the case of the Wild Angels, it sold almost a half a million albums. And that really gave us capital. And of course, we didn't have any investors. And that's also been a positive thing for me because I haven't had investors who have been pushing me to sell. A lot of times investors want to invest, but then they want to monetize their investment. And that means you have to sell. So I haven't had that issue. When you're starting this label out and you're looking at all these different niches that you can go into, How do you, as the founder of this label, how do you know what's going to work for country or all these different genres or religious music or rock and roll? How do you have an ear and hear an artist in all these different genres and think, yes, that's going to be successful? He or she is going to be popular. Well, that's a very significant question and probably the most important question that you could ask. And I wish that I could tell you that I have the ability to do exactly what you said. I was just on call this week where we were talking about a couple of issues within our own company as we decide the next single for a couple of our artists. And I said, you know, I know about record production. Obviously, I have had success as a songwriter. I've won VMI awards in country and in pop music. I've had success as a songwriter. I've had success with my band that was doing the music for the movies, The Arrows. I had success with the Mike Curb Congregation. We were weekly regulars on the Glen Campbell Show. So I've been on the artist side. I've been on the songwriting side. But to me, the area that it helped me the most was learning to produce records. And back, I think it was many years ago, I think it was all the way back in 1972, when I was Billboard Producer of the Year. I mean, back then, I was producing records like Sammy Davis Jr. Candyman. I would do it with my group, my crib congregation, and I would make records with Sammy. I would make records with the Osmond family. We had... My goodness, we had Donnie and Marie Osmond. We had the Osmond brothers. We had Donnie as a solo artist. We probably had over 100 chart records with counting all the members of the Osmond family, but it was a huge success. And they were really, in many ways, doing rock and roll. And I remember the Utah Saints once said the best rock and roll they had heard was coming from the Osmond Brothers. They were doing records like Crazy Horses and Down by the Lazy River and One Bad Apple and records that had R&B flavor and. and rock guitars, but they were a teen band. And I think we learned that there's a lot of different forms of rock and roll. There's teen rock and roll. There's country rock and roll. There's even middle-of-the-road artists, like Sammy Davis Jr., Al Marquino, Stephen Eni, those type of artists. You've got to put some kind of pop rock element into the production if you want them to be on, back at that time, if you wanted them to be on the radio. So I think maybe where I excelled was understanding how to produce the records. I don't want technical talent. I didn't have the ability to do the studio work, but I seemed to have the ability at that time to produce. But I would say today I have the ability to determine if something's a good record. I can determine if it's well produced. I can determine a lot of things about the balance of it. I can determine a lot of things about the feel. But I do not think that I possess the ability today to point a finger at a record and say it's a hit and it will be a hit. And if if you ever find someone who could do that, you need to give me their phone number because I don't really think there's anybody. And I mean, there are people who. who get into niches and have success, or they get into a production group, and it works for a while. But I don't know anyone yet... who could just point at a record and say, that's going to be a hit. But, but I do know how you, I guess what I'm saying is I know how to put the odds in our favor by making sure it's a good record, uh, making sure it's a good artist, making sure we have the best musicians, the best producers, the best arrangers, the best studio. You could, you put the odds in your favor and then, uh, You pray. HubSpot is a success story partner. Now, customers are using traditional search less and less to find the businesses they want to buy from. Now, when a buyer or a customer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? They're looking for a product, they're looking for a service, and they're going into some AI chat tool and they're saying, hey, help me find the best one. If your company isn't showing up, you're missing out. And most companies have no idea if their business is showing up or even how to show up. And by the time they figure it out, figured out AI. This is what AEO is. Answer Engine Optimization. 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Use code success at monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code success. But I think that's, that's, there's, there's a lot of wisdom in that because. you have to put the odds in your favor. You have to take a lot of shots on goal. Like you do have to, you know, it's not like everything's going to be a home run, but if you, if you, if you, if you try enough, you'll find a few that'll be successful. And I also think this is maybe you have an opinion on this. You probably do. For creatives in particular, I think it's difficult for creatives. And when I say creatives, we're talking about artists. We're talking about now people that create content online. You can talk about anyone who puts work out into the world in a traditional sense or whatever. But when things don't go well, their identity is so wrapped up in their work that I think it's really easy for them to become very depressed if something doesn't hit the first time, for example. Really? Yes. You made me smile because you're right. I mean, an artist could get... In today's world, an artist can be unhappy with their album cover, and the next thing you know, you're reading about it on the Internet or in social media. So you have... Yes. I mean, if there's 30 artists, for example, I mean, our current record company probably has about 30 active artists between country, contemporary Christian, pop rock and so forth. It is impossible for all 30 of them to be happy every single day. Abraham Lincoln, I always hear when he did the Gettysburg Address, you can please some of the people some of the time, or you can please some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time. And I think it's the same way in the music business. You can please... Some of the artists all the time and all the artists some of the time, but not all the artists all the time. So, yes, you're right. I don't know if I would say depressed, but some artists do get very down when their records don't hit. But that's what makes them an artist. I mean, they're human beings. And it's just like when you have kids. You know, I have two daughters. They didn't wake up happy every day. They had challenges. But we tried to provide a positive home and put all the odds in their favor, give them the best education, try to be with them as much as we could, as dinner and take them to good places on the weekends. We tried to do all the things to put the odds in our favor, but I can't say we made them happy all the time. And, you know, it's a big challenge. And you know that in your world, right? I mean, can you make all your people happy all the time? Definitely not. Definitely not though. No, I think the lesson is like stacking the odds in your favor, not letting, not letting, you know, when things don't go right, maybe depresses too. I'm sure it happens to people, but not letting, not letting you just feel like, well, it didn't work out last time. I'm going to quit. Like, that's really it. And for artists as well, like they got to keep taking shots and, and keep showing up and, and like, I, I would even like, I mean, I'm just going to read a little bit more of your story so people understand. When you're talking about signing the Osmonds, when you're talking about Sammy Davis Jr., you're still very young when this is all happening, if I'm not mistaken, right? Like when you were 24, that's when you became president of MGM. Yes, well, I kind of alluded to that earlier. When I was 24, I had been in business at that point. You know, certainly my company had been active at least five years, and we were having success on the West Coast. not only with some emerging artists, but with the soundtracks. We did the soundtrack to so many movies, or we put songs in movies. I think maybe over 50, there were over 50 TV commercials or movies or song placements in movies or scores that we did just during the first five years. And MGM was struggling with their record company. They were losing a lot of money. And they came to me and said, could we merge them together? Now, at that point, they had 80 percent. I only had 20 percent. So it wasn't a full partnership. But at that age, to be president of MGM and Verve Records, which was one of the labels they owned, which was very significant in jazz music, And their publishing firm, Robert Feist & Miller was one of the top firms. So that was a tremendous learning experience for me. But it only lasted really less than five years because MGM, again, once the company started succeeding, they wanted to merge and sell, which they did. They sold to MGM. Polygram, which was a Dutch and German entity with Deutsch Grammophon and Philip Zappalen, they came in and bought it at that point. And then of course, that ended up going through over the years, it's now, those masters are universal, but we've been able to work out an arrangement where we could use those masters. And in some cases we got a lot of them back, but we were, but the, Ever since that period ended in the mid-70s, we have focused on owning our own catalog and making sure that we have content. Because the one thing, a lot of the tech companies, a lot of these companies don't have content. Content. A lot of these are, you know, they have all kinds of delivery systems. You know, I'm not knocking them. My goodness, six, the tech companies have done wonderful things. But I'm saying we have content in our company. Catalogs, you take Hank Williams Jr. or the Judds, Sawyer Brown, Tim McGraw, Leanne Rines, Jody Messina, Winona, these artists that have recorded for us, Over the years, we have these big catalogs, but we also have current artists like for Canadian Country and We Are Messengers, Lee Bryce, Dylan Scott, Kelsey Hart, Francesca Battistelli, artists that are very successful at country and contemporary Christian music and so forth that are doing extremely well now. Yeah. One of the interesting things we're seeing with Spotify, with Amazon, and some of our distributors is their algorithms change. So the algorithms, for example, just this past year on how catalog is weighted versus new product. has gone more in favor of new product. So theoretically, you can have the same catalog sales you had last year, but being paid less because of the algorithms. If you ask me to explain that, I'll put that right up with the tech issues I don't understand. But I do understand the difference in how we're paid, because we do that every year. And our goal is very different than many of the public companies. Our goal is to keep our team together because when you have catalogs, you want people who know what's in those catalogs. So it's a tremendous benefit to have people who understand the systems and the music who have been there previously. 20, 30, 40. I mean, we have one person who's been there 60 years. We celebrated our 60th anniversary a couple of years ago. But we had one person who had been with us almost the whole 60 years, Charlie Hatcher. And my sister, my sister has been there for almost the whole run. So, I mean, it's a fascinating thing. But we have people who have been with us ahead of our... LA office, Tracy Moore has been with us almost 40 years, been in San in Nashville, almost 40 years. That's a very, very important thing to maintaining the history of your company and also people who understand your catalog and who understand how you do business and the changing business. I mean, just during my lifetime, it's gone crazy. they had the early big 78 speed records and then it was 45 RPM records. And then it was 33 RPM. And then it was the big clunky cassettes. And then it was, then it was the, the mini cassettes that became so successful. And then the compact is the CDs and then, and then downloading, downloading and iTunes and, and, and, and now streaming. And now even further, AI. We just made an agreement with Udiol. And we are having serious negotiations with Suno. They are both leading AI companies to figure out how our product can benefit. I mean, we obviously don't benefit if they copy our record. But to the extent that we can control that and get away from just having our record copying, to the extent we can stay away from that model, but to the extent we can find ways to utilize AI to create income for our artists... and to grow our music. And that's something we're looking at now. It's not as easy. Everybody kind of thought AI was going to be the same in streaming, where, okay, it's going to be a distribution system, and suddenly you're going to have more and more sales through streams. AI is not the same. AI is a whole different animal in how we use it, and how we monetize it, and how we do it in a way that our artists are at. and how we do it and avoid litigation. I mean, they're constantly, you're reading, artist X says, hey, that's my riff that they're using. Well, then there's litigation and we don't want that. So basically, we have to figure out how to work with AI in a positive way. And I just had a meeting just a couple of weeks ago with the key person at Suno. And as I mentioned, we've already made an agreement with UDL. And so we're excited to see, I'm excited to be alive and be able to participate in this, hopefully this next decade, which is going to be very, very influenced by AI. So what are you seeing now in the industry with, because I think a lot of creatives are very stressed about AI and how it's going to, because what AI is doing is it just takes a whole, and it's, I see it more for, for writing and writers and books because what AI did is it just took a whole bunch of pieces of work and then it consumed them and ingested them. And then it learned different topics and writing styles and what I'm assuming it's doing the same thing for music. So how do you navigate that? Like as an artist, these conversations that you're having with, with, uh, with these groups, what are they, what are they suggesting artists do or should artists worry? What is the, what is the average conversation sound like with some of these, like these two companies you just mentioned? We were not able to go into great detail because of the confidentiality there. But I think what we all know publicly is that we're finding ways where the artists can use it. For example, if you're a songwriter. And you want to make a demo. We used to have to hire musicians, book a recording studio, do all kinds of things. Wait maybe two or three weeks. Now you go to AI and make a demo. And the demo sounds really good. In fact, some of these demos that come through AI sound like finished records. Well, a songwriter can actually benefit from... by putting his song into AI and making the record. AI will make the record. And again, you might say, who's singing? Well, there's thousands, maybe millions, ultimately, of music that's piled into this AI platform, and it comes back, and theoretically... It's not anybody, but it's really that voice you're hearing on that demo is a combination of every voice that's ever been put in. And I don't understand how it works. I mean, you I'm sure you've tried it, but you could write a song. And now you could go to AI and say, here's the title of a song and write the song. My daughter, if she she's not doing it, but she's studying for her doctorate. She could go into AI and say, here's my thesis. I need to do a thesis on subject X and it'll come back. And the teachers have a terrible time knowing whether it came through AI or... And so it's very fast. So I would say that it's a good thing if you're a songwriter and you've written a song and you want to do a demo. I would say that the AI platform works perfectly. Now, if you're making a master record. Now the question is, what do you do with it? Let's say you go in and you make a record in UDEO or you make a record in Sunil. How do you exploit it? How do you exploit it without litigation? And so I can tell you what we have not been able to figure out. We've not been able to figure out how to take a record that someone creates in UDEO. or creates in Suno, we haven't figured out how to take that outside and monetize it like you would do with a record that you straightened. because you kick them, there's a legal risk to it. Now, there are rumors that there's going to be legislation that will give some protection, but I haven't seen it yet. I have a call next week with the head of the organization that represents the independent labels to discuss it. But we're a ways away from litigation. We're a ways away from litigation. language or a law of some kind that would protect us from litigation. But at some point in time, we're going to have to find a way for these great pieces of music that are being created within these companies like Urio and Suno, how to get that music, how to exploit that outside of their platform. Now, you can exploit it within their platform, but but exploiting it outside their platform without taking the legal risk that an artist will say, that's by riff, you know, and that's already happening, you know. NetSuite Next is a success story partner. So they say that every day your business is late to using AI, you fall two days behind and the competition is only moving faster. So how do you keep up? Well, fortunately, there is NetSuite Next. Now, you probably already know NetSuite. NetSuite is the AI-powered business management suite. It's trusted by over 43,000 customers. It securely connects all of your data, financials, inventory, commerce, HR, CRM into one single source of truth. But NetSuite Next is the next huge leap in how businesses get done because AI is built into everything you do. So NetSuite Next automatically shows you all these custom insights for your business throughout your day. You'll have AI agents work alongside you to solve problems and handle routine work. 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Results based on a January 2026 analysis of 14,203 NoomGLP1RX program members who logged weight over a 40-week period. Higher app engagement was associated with greater weight loss at 16 weeks. I think it's interesting because I've had this conversation with a few people. people are worried that AI will replace creatives. You know, somebody sitting behind a computer can create a piece of work, a written work, a song, a piece of content, and that will gain popularity, and then you won't even need, you know, the singer or the writer. But I don't agree with that because I feel like people... want to listen to a song from a person they can see in real life. They want to read a book from an author that they know is a real person, a real great author. I think that even if the creatives use AI to help them, there still has to be a person who's talented behind the scenes. I think that's how humans are. They connect with other humans. And I also know for a fact that most platforms – So YouTube, I don't know if Spotify is doing it. Maybe, you know, Instagram, like when you create AI work and you just post it as is images, videos, et cetera, a lot of the platforms I think are flagging it and letting the, letting, you know, the audience know that it's AI and they're demonetizing it and they're deranking it and they're not, they don't love promoting pure AI content. So I think that at the end of the day, It's the human, it's the talent that uses AI that will be successful and maybe, you know, make work quicker or do work at a lower price or what, like, that means that you can now, you don't have to hire an editor for the book you're working on. Now you can use AI to help you edit it, for example. Or maybe you don't have to hire, you know, you don't have to record all this expensive studio time if you're an up and coming writer. Maybe now you can use AI to help you, even though you're still an artist. You're just using it to become a little bit more effective and efficient. And I think that that's why I'm not so worried about AI, because I don't think that humans want AI without the human. I agree. The part of AI that's not good is when you see a company firing 10% of their people, replacing them with an AI, whatever. That's not something that I'm excited by. talk to anyone in the silicon valley you'll see that i don't want to use the word chaos but there's a lot of this because those those people have been trained specifically and they're good they've been trained but they didn't go to a regular college they they got their college education through these tech companies and now the tech companies maybe maybe in some cases are replacing them with a so that that to me is not good but when you look at medical sites look at these treatments that they're finding and vaccines, if you look at all the different things, there's incredible things that AI is going to do. Right now, I think the algorithms are working a little bit against us. in the music industry, but I think long-term, when we figure out how to use AI and how to monetize it, I think long-term it's gonna be a plus. Short-term, it is a bit complicated because we can't find a way to use these products But this music, this wonderful music that's being created inside these companies like Suno and Uriel, we haven't figured out how to take that music out and take it to the world. It's not going to be as simple, but you remember streaming took a long time. Nobody thought streaming was going to be more than one or 2% of the business. And now streaming is over 90% of our sales revenue streaming. I mean, and as opposed to selling physical CDs or even, even vinyl for, you mentioned even with Spotify and streaming, now the algorithms change. So now it's favoring, you know, new music versus catalog and it changes how you get paid and whatnot. So, How do you, as a business owner, as somebody who's been doing this for such a long time, how do you navigate? And not just a business owner. Think about the individual artists, too. What's your recommendation for somebody whose, whose business is dependent on someone else's platform to a degree, a significant degree. They make a change in the algorithm revenue switches from new catalog to new music. There's significant numbers behind that for sure. How do you navigate that? First of all, You have to structure your business so it can withstand the changes over the years. I mentioned the changes going from the 45s and the 33s and the cassettes and the CDs and the downloading and the streaming and the future of AI. All that has changed during my lifetime. So in every time there are issues, imagine the, imagine the issues that you had with catalog when, when it changed for physical, suddenly you had all of these inventories of physical product and everybody wanted to stream. So, and, and with streaming, of course, you, You don't have to worry about inventory. So you see with streaming, so while streaming scared everybody at the start, remember Napster, everybody wanted to go after Napster. Well, Napster really came back five years later and they called it iTunes, didn't they? I mean, but you had Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs knew how to monetize it, knew how to package it. And most of all, Steve knew how to get support from the industry. That was not something that Napster could do in 1999. You know, so we've always seemed to fight as an industry. We always have seemed to fight the new format. But over time, the new format has usually given us amazing opportunities. So right now we're looking for work, where those amazing opportunities are with AI. We're looking for that. Yeah. You look into the future. Yeah. And if you can find someone who can give us that answer and also someone who can tell us which records will hit, if you could give us those two, you'd make my job a whole lot easier. Yeah. I think that, listen, the people who will always be successful in life are the people that aren't afraid or resentful of new technology. Like if you are resentful of it, if you push back against it... At some point, it's just going to burn you. You have to do what you're doing. You have to have the conversations with the companies that are leading the new wave of technology. You would have had to have had that conversation with Spotify or all the other streaming platforms. You have the conversation now with all the AI music platforms. And you just, even though it's disruptive, it won't disrupt you if you understand it. It really won't. And I think that the people that like, this is, we're talking about music, but this is every industry. It's like, if you're building a company, you could be building a service-based business, like a lawn care business. You could be building a manufacturing company that manufactures whatever widgets. If you're like, I'm not going to use AI, I'm not going to understand it. Like eventually it's going to kick your ass a little bit. You got to... You got to understand it. And I mean, this is a perfect example. So you've been in this industry for now 60 plus years and you've seen, and I'm sure you have examples and you don't ever have to name them, but you see people who were your peers who at some point were very successful at what they did and then they pushed back against streaming for an example and now they probably no longer exist. And I'm sure that this is, you have many examples of this because you've just been in this game. They gave away their spirit. I remember years ago when the cassette tape came in, there were significant record companies that made a deal to, in effect, sell their tape rights to a tape company. There were tape companies like Ampex and so on, GRT and so forth. There were tape companies. They bought the rights. And then when tape became the prominent delivery source, the record company was in trouble because they weren't able to sell. They weren't able to sell. I mean, what makes it, what works for us is we sell our music direct to Spotify. We sell it directly to Amazon, to Apple Music, to YouTube. We sell our music to, they're called DSPs, digital service providers. We probably, there's probably 50 digital service providers around the world that we sell our music to. So if we, so we don't, we don't have the issue we used to have of inventory, having inventories. Also it's worldwide. A person can cut a record today and tomorrow it can be worldwide on Spotify, uh, But then you start reading these stories about 100,000 records a day, 100,000 songs, and then, you know, students in school put it up. And, you know, it's amazing. I mean, trying to fight through all that. But to me, it's always been exciting to look at new stories. new tech opportunities. And so I'm very excited. And again, we are already made one deal. We're ready to make a second, third, and fourth. We're ready to make deals with the AI companies. With one provision, we ask that, they get our artist approval. We're not at the stage where we think, like in licensing, you can license something that maybe doesn't, without having to go to the artist, but when it comes to AI, because we don't know what it's going to be, we're asking the AI companies that we're working with to, once we give our approval, to get our artist to approve, because it's their voice, and once they put their voice in, then... They can't take it out. But then if they're going to say, that's my voice, when there's a thousand other voices in this, I mean, again, you're a tech person. But how they create these records and you hear a voice, who is that voice? It's the combination of everything that's been put in. So it's a whole new thing. And you can see how many artists are concerned because they're afraid that they lose their artistry. So that's where they've got to find ways. Now, there are ideas. I will say one thing, too, because I know this is more, you and I are both into teachable moments for the people we talk with. The idea that you can have your music reimagined. One of the top producers in the world, Bob Gaudio, created the four seasons. You had all those big hits back over like Sherry, big girls don't cry, walk like a man or what a night, all those huge hits. The Jersey boys were a Broadway show was the life of the four seasons. Bob Gaudio is a genius. And as a producer, he wrote those songs you produce. He controls the copyrights. He's working on a project with us to reimagine. his music in new ways, reimagine it. Like for example, most of those of us who produced records in the last century, we're not that good a producer for current records. I mean, if we're putting out a rap record, I'm not the right producer for that record. But the fact that we can take music with the artist's approval and reimagine it and take it to a new audience That's a fascinating thing. And I think that's an area that really hasn't been developed that could be huge going in. And we're looking at it very carefully where we get the artist approval and then we let them reimagine this with the idea that it's reimagined for a new generation. You know, it's really interesting. As you're just saying this, I'm just thinking, if artists are okay with reimagining their music for a new generation, or if they give consent to have their music or their voice or whatever licensed by these platforms, then that can become a new way where they get paid royalties or they get paid something fractional every time it's used, right? So there's ways to compensate. No matter how fractional it is, it couldn't be worse than streaming. Because streaming is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. But yes, I mean, I think artists are now used to the fact, we're all used to the fact of new fractions. When you imagine the number of streams it takes to have a hit, it's fascinating. But yeah. It's work. I mean, streaming, Spotify has been good. Spotify has been good. I mean, Apple Music has been good. Amazon, you know, look what YouTube has done. We had all those videos for years. YouTube has shown us how to monetize our videos. We used to make them just promotionally. And now some of those videos, even those videos, An artist like Tim McGraw, who was on our label for 23 years and had huge hits, like Blue Like You Were Dying and so forth. We can take those videos now and put them up on YouTube and they can be monetized because of YouTube. So, you know, people complain about everything. You know, you have people, you have friends, right? You have friends who complain about everything, and you have friends who wake up in the morning, like you and I do, excited to figure out, what's this day going to bring? How are we going to reimagine ourselves? I know you don't do a lot of social media, but I'll ask, I'll just ask two last things. The first one's a very easy thing. If people do want to learn more about you, like where can they go? Where's the website they can go to? If they go to MikeCurb.com. The last thing I always like to ask, your grandma is very wise. Your grandma gave you lots of good advice. I was researching your story and she always asks you questions, one of them being, who are you helping or how are you helping people? Not just are you making money, but how are you helping people? If you could, first of all, If you could answer that question now, what would you say? It's a two-part question. So how would you answer that question now? How are you helping people now? But also, after your entire career, what would be your piece of advice? Like the one most important piece of advice that you'd want to pass on to your kids, your grandkids, the next generation? Well, once you do succeed in business, I think it is important to give back. And I think most people get there at some point. Some people get there much later in life. But I would say in my case, the fact that we were giving back 50% of our profit for so many years has given me purpose. And I think it's given our employees a feeling that they're not just creating money. to create stock prices or whatever, but that they are maybe doing something for the public good. And they are, and they are doing something. And they know where we're investing this money. And some of them even go in and work in the homeless shelters. It's a huge issue, particularly for people like me who grew up in, California, seeing what's happened there into beautiful cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles and see how quickly you can lose. Even today, I'm in Austin, Texas, seeing a lot of wealthy people here, but there's homeless people everywhere. And we're actually here. We invested significantly in a shelter here. So, I mean, basically... It's a big, big issue. But once you start giving back, I think it gives you even more purpose. And particularly, I think it gives your employees more purpose. And I think the most important thing I would say to anybody is when things are a little bit down, those are the most important years. Everybody knows how to deal in business when the numbers are up and everything's working. But when everything's working, it also covers up. a lot of things. There's a lot of things you find that you're doing with expenditures when, when the business is good and you say, wow, now, now we, now every year, I mean, every business is going to have years where they have to tighten up. And I think the real, that's the most important thing. What you do when things aren't good is, will define what happens when things are good. Because then if you structure your business so it works when times aren't the best, then when times are good, then that's when you really see the excitement and value of entrepreneurialism. Pick a non-business lesson. After, you know, being around on this planet for 81 years, what is the most important lesson you pass on to your kids that's a not-business lesson? The main thing is for people to care about each other. You can't always make everyone happy, but you can care about people. And I think we live in a world, you know, because you come from the tech business, you see things many times that mostly good, but you see things happening with human beings in the tech industry, like what we're seeing out in Silicon Valley now, right? that aren't so good. And I would just say, make sure that we care about people because at the end of the day, there's, I mean, AI could do everything else, but they're not, people are still important and people who, who want to stay with you. And you see this in cultures, like in Japan, people join a business to stay for their whole life. And we have to have that in my generation. We don't see it now. A lot of times we see people coming in and say, well, I want to work at your company. I want to see if I like it. Have you ever had a young person say, I want a job. I want to see if I like it. And then maybe a year later, they go somewhere else to see if they like it. I mean, that's okay if that's what the person wants. But then you run into someone who wants to make their career at your company. And then you see a special bond develop it. And that's what we all look for. And sometimes we're lucky enough to find it.