Michael Walker: Yeah.

Chris Swanson: All right.

Michael: Let’s go. We’re doing it. We’re here with the Dakota Boys. Yeah. New band. A lot of shelf near you. I’m excited here today with my new friend, Chris Swanson. No relation to Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec, I’m guessing.

Chris: I get Ron Swanson a lot, though. I get a lot of Nick Offerman queries, even regardless of the name.

Michael: Uh-huh, it doesn’t totally surprise me. ’Cause when I saw your picture for your bio, I was like, you actually got a little bit of a Ron Swanson vibe to you, too. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Like, it could be like cousins.

Chris: It’s routine. I mean, probably twice a week I have Ron Swanson conversations.

Michael: Nice.

Chris: I don’t—

Michael: Hate it. Nice. I mean, yeah, to be compared to a character in a show—he’s a pretty good character.

Chris: Yeah. I’ll take it.

Michael: Cool. So a little bit about Chris. He co-founded Secretly Canadian in 1996, expanded into Secretly Group, and helped release some artists that you might’ve heard of, like Bon Iver—indie artists who started out obscure and later were able to reach wider recognition.

And he did that through building a robust distribution label services arm through Secretly Distribution. So I’m excited to have him on the podcast today, talk a little bit about the journey for anyone who’s maybe considering going an indie route or working with—rather than a major record label route.

Staying indie while still making a bigger impact and being able to reach a wider audience without losing your soul. Chris, thank you so much for taking the time and space to be here on the podcast today.

Chris: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.

Michael: Absolutely. So, maybe to kick things off, would love to hear a little bit about your journey and how you founded the Secretly Group and were able to help artists like Bon Iver grow to what they became today.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, it started just as a kid being obsessed with my dad’s and my stepmom’s and my stepdad’s record collections. They were very different from one another, and I just poured through them.

And then I got involved in the Columbia House Tape Club, where you’d get like 12 tapes for a penny. And I started a thing in junior high where—it wasn’t so much a scheme, it was very much built in—where I got everyone in band class, most everyone probably, I don’t know, five, six dozen people, to sign up for it also. And I’d get four free tapes for everyone I got to sign up, and I basically was learning the canon through the tape club.

And I’d go to the library and I’d check out records, and it just became so fun. Not only did I love the music, but I loved pouring through the album art and the liner notes and everything. And the whole record culture—I became obsessed with it.

And when I finally got to college and I had the opportunity to become a college radio DJ, it was like I was given entrance into the gates. It was just incredible. And I worked my way up in the first year to become music director at the radio station, and I would get calls from all the radio pluggers and record labels to try to get me to feature the albums that they were pushing at the time in our studio.

Because at the time, this was pre–MP3, this was pre-streaming and everything. Someone needed to have the record or the CD in order to play it on air. And I kind of, at first, relished the power and it felt like a sacred responsibility. I was a little pretentious about it. But then after a while I started to realize that actually this was—I was getting a little glimpse into the music industry, and it was beautiful.

And I was going to shows all the time. I was promoting DIY shows. I was still buying a lot of records. I was giving plasma twice a week so I could keep buying CDs. And I started to daydream more about how I might participate in the culture as more than just a fan.

And I started talking to my boss at the cafeteria I worked at in the dorm, and my dear friend Eric, who was co-music director at the radio station, and my brother was about ready to come to college. And I was like, “Ben, I think we’re gonna start a record label. Eric and Jonathan and I are gonna start a record label. Come to Bloomington and we’ll start it together.” And he was in.

And so we started this label, and it was like, okay, who do we wanna put out? What are we gonna do? And we didn’t really know what we were doing, but I was really obsessed with a 45 that was released at the time by a very obscure band from Ohio called Songs: Ohia, which was Jason Molina’s project.

And I reached out to Jason, and he agreed, and we released a seven-inch record. We did a thousand of them with hand-silkscreen artwork. We folded them all, hand-numbered all of them, a thousand of them.

And we got contacted by a few distributors—Cargo UK in London and Konkurrent in Amsterdam. And they were buying a hundred, two hundred each. And I think in my brain I thought that we would be kind of slinging them a couple here, a couple there to the record stores all over on consignment and everything. I didn’t even know what a distributor was.

And the music industry just started to come into focus for me very slowly. It took years and years, but it was beautiful. We were just these kids in a small college town in the middle of the country, and here we were slinging this 45 that we made all over the globe. And it sold out quickly, and we just became addicted—totally intoxicated by the process.

It felt great. It was humbling in a lot of ways. We were stubbing our toes all over the place, but we were on the path. We didn’t have a business plan other than put a little bit of money in—we all pooled some money—and then hopefully it comes back and then you do it again. That was pretty much the process.

And somewhere along the line in that first year, we created a distribution company. ’Cause we realized, as we were calling up distributors and trying to get their attention, we were pretty low on the food chain. And we thought one means of climbing that food chain and not being just this pest that was calling to get them to reorder or to pay, was to have more new releases—more new releases than we as a fledgling record label could supply.

And so we reached out to other small record labels at the time and asked, “Hey, could we be your distributor?” And one of those labels was Jagjaguwar. Darius—I reached out to him. I was a big fan of the albums he was putting out, and he said, “Yeah, that’d be great.”

And so we created a warehouse in the basement that Ben and I lived in, and all of a sudden, instead of having two new releases a year, because we picked up six other record labels, we were having like a couple a month. And it really helped us build an international distribution network, which felt really good.

And therein, Secretly Distribution was born. And it took years to realize—we were very much tickled by being involved in a DIY process and learning everything and having to piece it all together ourselves. But it wasn’t until years later that it really kind of gelled as a real philosophy about doing it independently, free of the major labels and major distributors.

And it involved, for about eight to ten years, us working with Warner Music Group, with their distribution arm, because we felt like that was kind of keeping up with the Joneses—like, “Oh, you gotta work with the big distributor to make it work.”

And it felt so good when we left that distributor after almost a decade and went completely independent again. And I think it took that shift for us to be like, “Oh, I see.” To really be participating in and contributing in a meaningful way to a purely independent path to market.

Michael: Hmm. Cool. That’s a great story. So what I’m hearing you say is that really this is just born out of pure love and passion for—

Chris: Yeah.

Michael: The craft itself.

Chris: We just wanted to participate. We just wanted to be involved in the culture. Mm-hmm.

Michael: Mm-hmm. Awesome. And yeah, through that journey, you were able to get really plugged in and energized by the process of helping bring that art to life and distributing it.

And you even had an experience where when you plugged in with some of these bigger machines, you realized, “Wow, there’s something off. There’s something that doesn’t quite feel right with that.” And when you reclaimed that energy plug and went back to the independence, you kind of re-plugged in.

Mm-hmm. Curious to hear your perspective on right now—it feels like an interesting moment for independent artists and independent record labels. Compared to the grand scheme of the history of the music industry, when maybe in the past you would’ve needed more distribution or needed more of an established company—curious, in your decades of experience, what are some of the shifts that you’ve seen in the overall distribution flow or process?

And what do you think right now—if there’s an artist listening to this or watching this who wants to catch the wave of what’s coming next—where do you see things going?

Chris: Yeah. About a decade ago, with the rise of digital service providers like Spotify, Amazon, Apple, et cetera, it really democratized and decentralized distribution—at least digital distribution—where artists no longer needed a label gatekeeper in order to get on the platforms, right?

They still maybe needed one to get records in stores, because that actually takes kind of a robust system and machine to efficiently get records in a lot of stores, especially globally. But digitally, anyone could do it with a few clicks of the mouse. And so that put record labels—and kind of put a spin on record labels—for a little bit. Luckily, I think we were just growing at the time where we didn’t really feel the bump, because we were kind of on the ascent at just the right moment.

I think had we been a little bigger sooner, we maybe would’ve felt the shake, but we were riding between these waves a little bit.

But a lot of labels got spooked. It was a little bit existential. All of a sudden artists can distribute on their own directly, they can do direct deals with distributors, bypassing a record label, getting distribution rates—which distributors take less of a percentage than record labels do traditionally.

And it was great. But I think what’s happened over the last decade is—and there are some real big success stories of artists doing it completely independently, working with no record label. They are effectively their own record label, or their managers providing the record label services, and just going direct through a distributor—big success stories.

But I think through the years, I feel like right now record labels are growing again, because I think artists are starting to see the distinction between the services they’re getting from a distributor—having a few people work their record—and then having to hire out all these other third parties, like publicists, digital marketing, designers, production people to make the vinyl, et cetera, et cetera.

They’re kind of assembling their own Navy SEAL team, which takes work. And then those teams don’t necessarily know how to collaborate because they just got involved together on this project a month ago.

And so artists are looking at that and doing campaigns that way with somewhat of a skeleton crew that’s just working together for the first time, versus a record label where—like for us—when we put out a Bon Iver album, we have 50, 55 people who do many campaigns together throughout a year, and know how to collaborate, and use telekinesis with one another, speak in shorthand, and do this campaign on behalf of the artist. It’s just a little bit different.

And so I think as the marketplace shifts, it’s a choice for an artist. Artists have choices. Do they want to work with a smaller team and take a larger share, or do they want to take a smaller share and work with a larger team that does it all the time? And there’s no really right or wrong answer. It’s great that artists have more choices.

Michael: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what I’m hearing you say is that one of the main benefits of working with the right label is that there’s a team of cross-functional departments that already have a relationship with each other. And rather than having all these different limbs that you piece together—sort of like Frankenstein—Mm-hmm.

You have this prebuilt organism that already has all the different bases covered, and that makes it more streamlined versus having to recreate all those different limbs on your own.

Yeah. I’m curious, from your perspective, the movement towards maybe independent record labels versus major record labels—is there a distinction there as well? And who do you think is the best fit for a label group like what you’re doing versus a major record label artist versus someone who maybe is at a stage where they should focus on being indie first? How do you view those life cycles?

Chris: Yeah, it’s— I think they’re very different. Maybe ultimately providing the same service, engaging in the same processes. There’s probably very little difference between them, but I think there is a specific makeup, or there are certain parameters that are very different, and one is independence.

You have the ability—which you don’t really have the ability at a major—to have a relationship with the founder. You have the ability to have a relationship with the owner and the ultimate decision-maker. And you can have a robust relationship with the entire team, but being able to text or get on the phone with the owner, and have the owner look you in the eye and say, “Hey, we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna deliver this for you”—that’s not possible at a major. From a scale perspective, it’s not possible. They’re releasing thousands of albums a year.

And also, some of these companies are publicly traded. It’s just not realistic.

And I think the other thing is the people. I do think there are really great people who work at majors, just like there are at indies. The only thing is having that continuity—the continuity is challenged consistently. It’s almost because there’s regime changes constantly. The people that you maybe fell in love with, that you felt like really got you and understood you at the major label—will they be there in a year and a half? Will they be there by the time you release your first album or by your second album? Statistically speaking, highly unlikely.

And I feel like that consistency is something that is special with independence. We don’t have those types of wholesale regime changes that majors love and are built around.

And then I think the other thing is oftentimes the way that a major is able to beat an indie is with a big check. And that can be great. That can be life-changing money sometimes, right? And you can’t begrudge a young artist at the start of their career from seeing this and being like, “Wow, this could change so much in my life, my family’s life.” That’s great.

But I do think there is something very stressful: it’s a bargain. And that’s the bargain that the artist taking that big check makes. It sets the bar for success and the perception of success so much higher.

And oftentimes I see artists who maybe should still have their career slow-cooking, and really focused on fundamentals, and really building something sturdy with incremental goals, with stretch goals and whatnot. All of a sudden, because they’re taking a really large check, the goal immediately becomes they have to hit here in order to feel secure in the business of what they’ve built.

And there’s so many ways that whether or not they’re successful gets telegraphed to them. Some is compare culture on social media and whatnot. But then a lot is pressure on the manager, or the manager directly placing it on the artist. Or just so many—it’s like if you take a half-million-dollar, or a couple-million-dollar check, you have to achieve revenues that are simply unrealistic for most artists on LP1 or LP2. And you don’t have the privilege to cook slowly and find the best way for you to express your art.

I see artist development as a series of milestones that are hit. A lot of those milestones are repeated artist to artist, and some are very unique to an artist. But it’s kind of like processing those milestones, and when all of a sudden a huge check comes in—even if it might change the financial reality or the economy of you and your family—it means those milestones need to process much more quickly, maybe more quickly than you’re able to process them.

And I think it can lead to radical doubt more quickly with an artist. And I don’t know that radical doubt is a good recipe. You don’t want that ingredient in the creative process. If you ask me, keep that ingredient out.

Michael: Radical doubt. It’s sort of like dropping a turd in the stew.

Chris: Yep.

Michael: It’s never gonna taste great. Wow. That’s a little more gross than I was expecting.

That’s really helpful. So what I’m hearing you say is that with those different approaches, for a major record label, one of the risks is if you’re building your music career and it’s like a building, you wanna make sure you’re built on a solid foundation and that you find the right ground to build on—it’s not built on sand.

And then once you start building, you need to make sure that the pillars are in place and the foundation is there so that if there’s a storm, you know it’s going to stay sturdy. And one of the risks is you might be able to have all the materials to build really, really fast, but if you feel this pressure to build so fast because it has to be X, Y, Z building by X, Y, Z time, then you might take shortcuts on building that real foundation and the structure in a healthy way.

And that can make it, in the short term, maybe appear like you built a building, but then it’s very easy for it to come crashing down.

Chris: Yeah.

Michael: And it doesn’t have that strong foundation from the heart and the soul that went into building the foundation in the first place.

Chris: And some of it is just perception too. There are very successful projects out there that if the bar hadn’t been set so high—had it been done in a different environment under the exact same results but in a different environment—that it would feel like a massive success.

Selling a lot of tickets for being on the first album or the second album. Mm-hmm. Selling a lot of vinyl, getting great reviews and all of that. But because it was a million-dollar check, it feels like, “Oh man, you only got a third of the way where you needed to go.”

And I see so many talented musicians whose careers are going smashingly—they’re doing so well—but they are steeped in radical doubt because it’s not to scale with the deal they did.

And it’s tough. Or it’s maybe— I do think there are situations where it’s not just about the size of the check where you could take a big check and you’re in the right place and people are like, “Hey, we’re not in a hurry to hit the numbers that we think you’re gonna hit. We’re not in a hurry for the revenues to get to that size,” where it really can be a nurturing place, but it’s rare. That’s a rare thing.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. It is really interesting just thinking about the power of expectation and how that can affect the exact same thing in a different frame.

What came to mind as you were sharing that was when you’re playing a show, you almost always want to downsize the room so that it’s a packed room.

Chris: Yep.

Michael: You want that full versus having—if you played a show in a thousand-cap room and there’s only 300 people there, it feels like, “Wow, there’s no one here,” and the energy is not there—

Chris: You maybe sold more tickets in a thousand-cap room than the 300. You maybe sold 400 tickets and made a little more. The bottom line is stronger.

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Chris: But it doesn’t feel as good.

Michael: Yeah, it is so interesting. So 400 tickets sold in a thousand-cap room versus a sold-out crowd of 300 in a 300-cap room—significantly different in terms of energy and vibe and the feeling of success.

Chris: The hang after the show with the musician who just played an incredible set—you know when you are like, “Oh, that was amazing, great job,” and they’re like, “Yeah, I know, it felt a little baggy in there. I wish we would’ve sold more tickets. The marketing didn’t go…” It’s like, no, you did a great show. That was amazing. Who cares how much space there was, or that they didn’t open the balcony or whatever. It was fantastic. And in the mind, or the self-report card, is poor. It’s like, “Oh gosh.”

Michael: Yeah. How do you recommend that artists find the right balance between setting goals and having expectations and ambitions without going too far and having that comparisonitis?

Because I feel like in some cases, part of the tension of having goals and comparing yourself to people who are ahead of you—if done properly, it can motivate you to hit those milestones or to grow. And if you surround yourself with people who are way bigger than you, then it gives you that drive to really level up.

But on the flip side, if taken the wrong way, that can feel really discouraging and it can cause you to snap, or have that radical doubt. So I’m curious, from your perspective, where’s that balancing line, and how does an artist design that in a way that gives them real progress?

Chris: It is tough. I feel for artists. I feel like artists are their own toughest critics, and they’re cracking the whip on themselves—waking up: “What can I do to build my project today?” And it’s not just the creation part, but also what could I be doing self-promotion wise?

And it’s hard. And the landscape of self-promotion now—social media—is so vast that alone can be a full-time job, let alone being on the road, or doing interviews, or recording in the studio, writing. Just being active on social media can be a full-time job.

It is hard, and I don’t really know the answer, but I do think it starts with surrounding yourself with the right people that are aligned, that speak the same language as you, so that you can communicate about it, and you don’t have to be all bottled up with these tensions.

Because most creatives who are making things that they’re proud of and expressing themselves do want an audience. Maybe a few are okay just doing it in a vacuum. But most—it’s not just creating or expressing for themselves. They want it to be witnessed, and they want an audience.

And we have more metrics now in 2025 than we’ve ever had to judge the shape, the size, the depth, the quality of the audience, and it’s dizzying. And so I think it’s a really confusing place.

And I think those musicians that are able to come to peace with where the commerce is and where the creative is, and try to find that sweet spot where they can live together without clashing—oftentimes the commerce can clash or hurt the creative.

And I think it does have to do with: who do you have to talk to? Who are the people on your inner circle that you’re able to communicate with and share and process—almost like what’s your therapy system, kind of business and creative therapy.

I think that’s big. I think finding people who are like-minded and aren’t expecting you to be something that you’re not, that have just the right amount of motivating energy. Some people want to be pushed; some people can’t be pushed.

And it gets really exciting at first when people are writing about your art, but then it kind of hits a tipping point where maybe you shouldn’t read what people are saying about your art. Maybe you gotta stop reading the comments, because it can drive people crazy.

And so, yeah, I don’t really know. I don’t have a great answer for it, but I think it has to do with the people in your life, and maybe whether it’s your family or your chosen family—who you surround yourself with—and how they help you navigate the fact that you’re doing something publicly. And it can become like a house of mirrors a little bit.

Michael: Hmm. Yeah, that’s super helpful. So, the answer that comes to mind as you shared all of that is around—because you’re talking about how maybe there’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach, but it depends on how much tension you want and are able to handle, what your goals are, and how much you can sit in that tension.

For some people, they might really wanna be pushed, and some people might not need to be pushed at all. It reminds me of this analogy of a rubber band where with the proper amount of tension, you can create really good action, but if you pull it too far, it can snap.

And so making sure that you’re intentional about your community—who you’re surrounding yourself with, your team, your family, your chosen family—is a great way to have that support and give you more ability to pull back on that rubber band without snapping, because they’re there to support you on that journey.

Chris: And I think it’s also important to recognize that your appetite or tolerance for the business part of the creative endeavor might change from project to project, or over time it may shift.

You might be prepping, finishing up an album that you’re like, “Wow, I think this is kind of my go-for-it moment.” And you psych yourself up—you and your team get ready: “I’m gonna really go for it. I’m gonna put myself out there on this one. I’m gonna be super present. I’m gonna say yes more than I did last time, and I’m gonna go for it.” I’ve seen that time and again.

But then maybe the following album, you’re like, “Okay, I really put myself out there.” Like, we work with an amazing musician named Mitski, who used to be really out there and really engaged in social media and was online. And then after a while she felt like, “I feel like I’m giving too much of myself for this to feel good. I need to pull back.”

And for the most part, she got offline and started to gatekeep much more how much access the world had to her, how much the fans had of her. And instead she would put it into the album and then put it on stage. But aside from those two places, she was kind of absent, and her mental health flourished.

But she also had been massively successful. So it had built to a point where it could sustain it, even if it plateaus there, or even if it starts dipping down because your participation in the marketing process decreases. It’s still at a sustainable level for you.

And I really think it’s different from person to person, or from season to season. And I think trying to surround yourself with people who can move with you and adjust accordingly—maybe to compensate for some things, or to support you.

Michael: Mm. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot of wisdom in the concept of seasons, and crop rotation, and even just like breath in and breath out.

There’s times to really drive and go all in and put yourself out, and then there’s times for coming back and re-centering and getting offline. And it sounds like what you’re recommending is that you just pay attention to what phase you’re in right now, what feels right, what actually supports the creative work.

And it might be different at different points of your career. You might feel a different calling towards what’s right for you. Mm-hmm.

So one thing that—I mean, it probably wouldn’t be the Modern Musician podcast if we didn’t have at least one part of this conversation addressing a big new development at the time of us having this conversation, which is AI, and music—AI and music promotion, AI and music creation.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Michael: So I’m curious to hear your perspective as someone that’s been in this industry for decades and seeing revolutions, and seeing things like internet-based distribution, social media—now having the tools to be able to take what used to take months or years to create music and be able to create tracks and songs really quickly.

What’s your general take on the current landscape of AI, and what would your recommendations be for an artist right now who might be a bit concerned, watching like, “Wow, this is a huge tidal wave.” What should I do with this thing?

Chris: I think AI—there’s a couple conversations embedded in there.

One is AI as a tool for human creators to express themselves. And I know I—and my colleagues—we’re all for: use it in the studio, do whatever, or on stage, or use it whether it’s visually or sonically. It’s not—I mean, go back to the synthesizer, which was gonna replace orchestras back in the late seventies. Or the drum machine, the vocoder, Auto-Tune—whatever it was. “Oh, so now any bozo can be a singer.” It’s like, come on.

These are beautiful tools that have real artistic merit, period. End of story. I think AI—we’ll look back at this era and be like, the fear of it being used by humans to make cool things is probably a little silly.

I think where the tidal wave that you refer to is maybe a different thing. And that’s the mass manufacturing of songs: creating thousands of songs like a farm, generating them and just pumping them out on DSPs to displace human-made music.

I think that is, from a purely statistical standpoint, terrifying. It will impact things, it will impact the economy, it will disrupt the economy intensely, and it will go to the very few profiting and it will disenfranchise the many. That is something we need to pay attention to.

And I’ve been seeing in the last couple weeks—and this morning I got an email from a musician that we’ve worked with for over a decade—who had a song that wasn’t his band put up on DSPs, labeled as his band. And it’s clearly AI. And it’s like—the DSPs need to create gatekeeping mechanisms to prevent that.

We were able to take it down, but it takes a few days. And if these things happen faster, it is such a waste of time. But it just shows if this was scaled up, it could become gargantuan. And it’s using someone else’s likeness, their intellectual property. It’s gross, and it needs to be handled.

And I don’t think we can trust the DSPs right now to manage their algorithms in a way that don’t favor AI-generated, bot-generated music from supplanting human-generated music. I don’t think we can trust that right now. Or even if we can—can we trust them in a few years? There’s no—it’s pretty gross.

And I don’t really know what to do. I’m kept up at night by it. It’s spooky. Real spooky. I don’t know if it’s gonna require legislation. It’ll take a different set of leaders to figure that out. But it’s real gross.

Michael: Hmm. Yeah, I appreciate that. That feels like a very honest answer, which I think is about as honest as any of us can be.

There’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot that we just don’t really know about where things are headed. And it’s reasonable to both see the massive opportunities and the creativity benefits that come from it, as well as acknowledge the potential risks and the downside and the challenges.

I hadn’t really thought about that idea a whole lot, but you’re right—it is terrifying, the programmatic generation of a full industry of songs. What comes to mind for me is having an AI bot that pays attention to all of the headlines in the news and all of the current events, and then generates potentially viral songs or music meant to tap specifically into the zeitgeist of what we’re experiencing as a culture.

I know there’s some very interesting cover-remix AI tools. There’s one with a 50 Cent song recently that got remixed to be like a fifties jazz song and it went viral. And I would expect to see a lot more cover-remix things like that come up.

Bottom line is more and more music. It’s gonna be more saturated than ever. So in that world, as an independent artist, how do you cut through the noise, and how do you build community?

And yeah, it makes me grateful that there’s folks like yourself that have a true human passion for the art itself and the culture of what makes music what it is. I feel like communities are really at the core, the heart of music. And communities of AI robots—I don’t think we’re quite there. Maybe when there’s humanoid robots, they’ll form communities, but it seems like one thing that’s gonna be hard to replace.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, bots clumping together and clustered into communities—it’s probably already there.

I do think subcultures like we’re participating in, where we’re actively participating and the fans are actively participating, the artists are actively participating—and I’m not talking mainstream massive success, but the pocket of the world where we and our artists move around it. It’s not just one pocket; we contain multitudes. But it is generally a solar system of fans and whatnot.

And I do think that they crave and will continue to seek out—even if things get a little more dystopian—will continue to seek out and fill their lives with not just music, but media in general, art in general, that is made by humans with a personality, with a story, with pathos.

And I think that’s still gonna persist in the same way that when physical sales plummeted in the aughts and the early 2010s—CDs crashed—we were kind of okay because our subculture still wanted to hold things. They cared about that. Our fans were over-indexing with physical sales. They still wanted something on their shelf, or wanted that kind of prize or reminder or more things to look at and touch.

And I hope that will persist when there are so many more replicants out there on DSPs where you can’t quite tell the difference between the two. I think the heads will still know. And they’ll be able to—you almost have a sixth sense for it. And we’ll seek the good stuff: the people actually participating and contributing to the culture.

Michael Walker: Mm. Yeah. It is a little bit like—back to the analogy at the beginning of the conversation around building the house on the right foundation—or another way to look at it is setting the roots for a tree.

If you have strong roots that are actually born in something real and authentic, and it’s a community, then that’s going to withstand storms better than something that grew really fast and looks really flashy and cool, but it doesn’t have real roots to it, and therefore it’s easier to topple over.

Chris: Yeah.

Michael: That gives me a little bit of solace as well. I think it’s a good way to think about it.

Chris: It does. And also, I think a lot of subcultures really thrive in environments with really clear adversity. Mm-hmm. And so I’m trying to see a little bit of a silver lining on something that spooks the heck out of me.

Michael: Yeah. Cool. Well, Chris—AKA Ron Swanson’s cousin—it was great connecting with you today. I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the podcast.

And for anyone who is listening or watching this right now and wants to connect more with you or the collective resources that you’ve created, what’s the best place for them to go to learn more?

Chris: I would go either to secretlygroup.com, or you can find me on socials at @chrisswansonssecretly.

Michael: Hmm. Awesome. The secret is out.

Chris: It’s—

Michael: I’m sure you’ve never heard any jokes about secrets before.

Chris: Not in 29 years. Haven’t, no.

Michael: Awesome. Well, like always, we’ll put the links in the show notes for easy access.

And Chris, thanks again for being on the podcast today.

Chris: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.