If you’ve listened to the radio in the past 40 years, there’s a good chance that Ted Cohen has had something to do with it. As a veteran music executive, Cohen has been involved with releases by Alice Cooper, Dolly Parton, Paul Shaffer, Neil Diamond, and many others. He consulted for Napster, DreamWorks, Amazon, and Microsoft, and co-chairs the Grammys Technology Committee. Recently, he’s been hired as the Entertainment Executive in Residence at the University of Tulsa, working with students in the Arts, Culture, and Entertainment Management program. I met up with Cohen at his apartment.
Z.B. Reeves: How did you end up as the Entertainment Executive in Residence at TU?
Ted Cohen: What happened was: Do you know Larry White? Everybody seems to know Larry. Larry and I worked together at Warner. We would hire managers for what we referred to as “baby bands.” Larry moved here in 2014 from LA. I still don’t know how he ended up here. I know I ended up here because of him.
In 2018, [Larry] invited me to [talk to the] Woody Guthrie Center, give them some ideas on some fundraising stuff. We ended up getting tours of Gathering Place. We went to Cain’s, saw where Sid [Vicious] did his thing.
I came back in 2022 for the opening of the Bob Dylan Center. We went and saw [Sid’s] hole in the wall at Cain’s again. I said, “I was here with them, in ‘78.” They said, “We’re going to do this event: the 45th anniversary of The Sex Pistols. Why don’t you come in for it?” I came in for it.
[While in Tulsa,] I got a call from a friend of mine who’s an ex-Microsoft person, saying, Sean Alexander heard you’re in town and wants to have a drink with you. Come to the Valkyrie.
So I went to the Valkyrie. Greatest bar I’ve ever been in. I show people pictures; they say, that’s not real. Anyway.
So I sat with Sean. He says, I want you to meet Brad Carson; I end up doing a call in April of 2023 with him. He invites me back in August for Alice Cooper, Motley Crue, Def Leppard at the stadium. We’re in Brad’s thing on the 50 yard line on the top floor and there’s a guy and his son. We were talking for a while before I found out his name was George Justice; he was Provost at the University.
To make a long story short, there was a trajectory to move here. Sean said I should move here; Brad said I should move here; George said I should move here. Larry had talked me into coming here. We taught an AI course a year ago, January, in between semesters. And I moved out of my place in LA in December and everything ended up here.
ZBR: Let’s talk about AI. You’ve advocated for students to use AI music creation tools to help them—
TC: As a collaborator. If you’re stuck on a chorus or a verse or want to try a guitar part, you’re doing with AI what Steely Dan did in the studio. There’s a guy named Elliot Scheiner; Elliot was Steely Dan’s engineer. For every song that you’ve heard on a Steely Dan album, there were 30 guitar or piano or Hammond B3 solos [that didn’t make it onto the track].
I was saying to a filmmaker, if you have projects that you try and get funded, greenlit, whatever—if you can go into Midjourney and create the storyboards and you can go into Suno or Udio and create music for a scene that you’ve animated using Midjourney, you could put in, maybe it’s not the final music, but it’s a temp track [close to] what you want, and you get funded.
Isn’t that a great thing? You didn’t have to hire somebody to draw every frame of the storybook and go find the music and see if it kinda works in the scene and then find some rough footage that sorta looks like the footage you haven’t shot yet. You’re basically ending up with something that’s a little easier for an investor or a foundation or whatever to fund.
So if you think of it as tools, great. If you think of it as writing the next Crosby, Stills, and Nash album, it’ll do a pretty good job, but it doesn’t have the same heart yet. But it might.
ZBR: There was that band a while back, Velvet Sundown, the AI band.
TC: Right, sounds sort of like Kenny Loggins and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. We have a situation right now—and I don’t know how it’s going to play out—where you’ve got Spotify mixing AI music into playlists.… They own the AI stuff, or they’re paying it a reduced royalty rate. It makes their economics better.
The labels are concerned because, ‘oh my God, you’re using AI, and you’re not using our artists.’ I have this dark concern that at some point someone at Warner or Universal or Sony will go, ‘you know, [we] really love Bob Dylan’s music, but he’s a real pain in the ass to work with. So give me the next Bob Dylan. Okay, we own him.’ Have you seen Tilly Norwood?
Cohen shows me a video of Tilly Norwood, the AI actress, on Good Morning Britain.
TC: She’s wonderful. She’s my favorite.
ZBR: What do you mean when you say she’s your favorite?
TC: I mean, well, she’s adorable. Years ago, [some colleagues and I were] asked to speak at the Motion Picture Association, the MPAA, and it’s [us] and a guy named Bob Pisano. Bob Pisano at the time was running Screen Actors Guild; he then went on to run the Motion Picture Association. But we’re going around the room talking about music piracy and film piracy. I said to Bob Pisano, what’s your biggest fear about film piracy? He said, I’m not afraid of film piracy. I said, what are you afraid of? He said, digital actors.
Now, this is 2003. 23 years ago. He says, right now it’s relegated to Playstation and Xbox games, but imagine when the CGI gets good enough that you can’t tell Tilly Norwood from … Katie Holmes. Like, we want Katie Holmes for the movie, but she’s not available or she’s being really difficult. You might [still] have a movie! But is that killing actors? I mean, is it really hurting actors, or is it just an evolution of animation?
ZBR: What do you think?
TC: I think it’s an evolution of animation, to a certain extent. I don’t think that a digital actor is, in the short term, going to hurt anything, but there will be things that are on the edge.
I think you [have to] figure out: how can I embrace it in a way that it’s going to help me do what I want to do? I mean … I’m really conflicted. I’m the most conflicted person you’re ever going to meet on these issues. Back in ’99, I was working for the original Napster and for the Recording Industry Association (RIAA). The RIAA had hired me to figure out what the rates should be for web radio, and Napster wanted me to convince the record industry that they weren’t trying to kill the record industry. And my running joke about it was that I wanted to be the winner, and if I worked for both of them, one of them was going to win the lawsuit!
ZBR: I think a lot of people are concerned about a Velvet Sundown situation, where there are whole songs being created from AI. You sat on the board of governors for the Grammys. If, at any point, an AI-generated song—like, fully AI-generated, only prompting, no melodic material from a person is on the recordings, no playing at all—if a song like that is “good enough,” “entertaining enough,” do you see a song like that, say, winning a Grammy? Do you see that as a possibility?
TC: Again, I’m incredibly conflicted. [Let’s take] Hans Zimmer. So Hans Zimmer has won Grammys and Oscars for original scores. Hey Alexa? What major awards has Hans Zimmer won?
Ted Cohen’s Alexa: Hans Zimmer has won two Academy Awards, three Golden Globes Awards, and four Grammy Awards.
ZBR: I think I know where you’re going with this. Hans Zimmer has assistants.
TC: Hans Zimmer has a room with 30 people. He’s sort of like what Andy Warhol was with paintings. Andy Warhol didn’t paint those paintings; he had the Factory, and he had people that he brought on board to do it.
ZBR: But humans did make them.
TC: Humans made them. But I’ve joked with friends, going: “Go find the piece of music that Hans Zimmer actually wrote.” As opposed to, “got somebody else to write.”
I managed a guy named Grant Geissman. He played with Chuck [Mangione] for years. And he wrote the music for Two and a Half Men. He worked with the guy who does Big Bang Theory. Anyway. When I met him, he was doing a lot of work for a company called “Network” down in San Diego, where they would have him come down for a couple days, have him stay in a hotel, motel, whatever, and basically say, we need some songs that sound like Paul Simon, but they can’t be too close to Paul Simon. Library music. Needle drop music. Give us something like “Hello darkness my old friend,” but nothing that we can get sued for.
Now, you can say to Suno or Udio, give me something similar to this, something that won’t get us sued. Suno and Udio and some of the other ones are basically doing the same thing, but they’re doing it mechanically.
There was a ruling that came down the other day by the Supreme Court, saying that AI-created art couldn’t be copyrighted. So say you’re using PhotoShop, and you’re touching up some artwork that you did; it’s your artwork; you can copyright it. You drop your artwork into Firefly in the Adobe Create Suite and you say, give me a different version of this, I want the flames to be a little more whatever or I want the sun to be whatever—now that you’ve used that Firefly tool you can’t copyright it, because you used AI to create it. I think it’s a weird decision.
ZBR: You disagree with it?
TC: It’s sort of like, you know, there was a point on Broadway where there used to be a mandatory 30-piece orchestra at every theater. There isn’t anymore. [Then] they had to pay some money every night to the musicians’ union as an apology, but you don’t need a full orchestra to do Tommy by The Who. We have tracks that Pete Townsend put together for the Broadway show—essentially stems that work for the musical. At a certain point, we didn’t need a tuba player every night. So how do you let go of that? Is it fair for the tuba player who thought he had a gig for life?
ZBR: What do you think of Tulsa so far?
TC: I love Cain’s, I love the Colony, I love Mercury Lounge. Everyone has been very nice to me. I’m used to spending my life backstage, and then going out to hear the music. Everyone has been helping me adapt to the fact that I may actually have to walk in the front door with a ticket.
The other night I pulled up in front of Cain’s on my E-Bike. I go to get off the E-Bike, my foot gets stuck on the bike seat, and the whole thing goes over, and the bike comes down on top of me. I’m convinced that I’m now my grandfather [with his] broken hip and I’m gonna have to have a hip replacement. Brad Harris, he’s head of production at Cain’s, and everyone else there, they run backstage and grab me ice in a towel, they get me a chair, my leg is killing me. A Tulsa policeman goes, you don’t need a towel, you need a plastic bag with ice, or else the ice is gonna melt through the towel again. And he goes and gets me a bag of ice.
Now, that’s not LA. I’m loving it here.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
