 Michael Murphy, it's Michael Murphy and Jim Rogers. Jim Rogers from Dublin City University and Michael Murphy from the Dunleary Institute of Art, Design and Technology. And what the book does is it sort of analyzes our music industry and why it has been successful and the reasons why maybe it's fallen down in certain areas. And it goes right the way through from amateur teenage promoters through to university entertainment officers. And then those that have been behind the success of some of the really big names in the industry like U2 and NN, the cores and so on. Well, Michael Murphy now joins us on the line and we're streaming live as well. Michael, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Delighted to be here with you, John. Thanks. Well, let's talk a bit about this book because it takes a behind the scenes look, I suppose, at the music industry. And you go back away as well. I mean, I'm not just chatting about popular acts in the last 20, 30, 40 years, but you go way back as well. Yeah. And, you know, when I started the book, I was doing a PhD in Trinity College in sociology. And I thought, OK, Irish pop music. So that that's the 1960s. That's the show bands, you know, nice to go back that far. But the further you go, John, you realize actually what happened in the 1950s has a direct influence on what happened in the 1960s. And I just kept going back and I ended up in New York in terms of the research with a woman called Eleanor Byrne, who emigrated as a teenager in the post famine years from from from Lytrum and founded a shop in Manhattan at a time when women didn't own their own shops. Now, she owned it with her husband. And there was a bit of pushback that you can't have a woman's name on the shop in Manhattan. You know, which we think of Manhattan has been so progressive. But here was this Irish woman. She started what probably was the first Irish store as they called them in the States. She sold Irish music. She realized it was demand for Irish music. And when the major labels decided not what they termed ethnic music has gone out of fashion, she said, I know my customers. There's still a demand and I want Irish music. She championed it and then she set up her own record label. So we've got a founding mother of the Irish record industry. Well, that's that's way back at the very start. And there's been a lot of pigs and troughs since that for the the industry. And I suppose there's been a lot of success stories along the way. Some of the acts that I mentioned there in the the intro. But a lot as well that have, you know, done well nationally, but internationally have fallen short. Yeah, and that's the big problem with Ireland is that we, in my opinion, we produce fantastic world beating music. But we don't have an industry that brings those artists to the world demand efficiently. We're still dependent on, you know, someone in New York or LA or London saying, hey, you know, I could see that having worldwide worldwide marketability. We've never ever developed kind of a series of Irish record labels. We've had Galen did a brilliant job with even with pop music in the 60s. We had a lot of records with the chieftains. We've never had very, very successful long term pop, pop record labels. And because of that, we don't have that many full time music managers in the country compared to the amount of brilliant bands that we have. And is that because of the size of the country because of the size of the market? Yeah, you know, we're a victim of our geography as well as beneficiaries of our geography. So, you know, anyone can get on a plane in my day. It was getting on the car ferry from Dunleary to go over to England. And we're so close that there has never been a need because generally the English record labels have enjoyed the Irish talent and have marketed the Irish talent. But at a time when the record labels are not signing as many artists, that's really, really bad news for Ireland. The record labels are investing. You see it all the time, the headlines. They're buying the back catalogs of Bob Dylan or Springsteen or Shakira because they know that there's a long term revenue stream coming from that. But the result is that they're not investing as much in you artists and that's catastrophic for Ireland. You deal with the music industry, I suppose, from, you know, almost management perspective. But what about before it gets to the stage of marketing a band abroad? What about the music industry here and in particular the live circuit here? I mean, do you know, is it all that it should be? Well, it is for the global music industry. We're fantastic at going to big gigs. We're fantastic at paying kind of above the odds for concert tickets. And obviously the whole summer, you know, we were bombarded with headlines about the Coldplay tickets and going to auction and people waiting on the phone, waiting online. Not knowing what price that we're going to be offered the tickets for by the time they got to the head of the queue. So we're brilliant at going to gigs. What we're not great at is supporting our local acts, going to see young developing bands, helping them make the transition from, you know, four pals forming a band. Where's the next step? How do you get on the radio? How do you make a video? How do you get a record deal? So there's a bit of a failing there. And to me, it's not because the music talent is anyway lacking because I'll put it up against music from anywhere. And there's a perception that we, when it comes to, well, the arts in general, but even music that we punch above our weight globally, is that true? I am without question. Historically, you know, look at us, even before recorded music, it's argued that the first million seller in the music industry, back when it was sheet music, you know, that you play piano along with. That was Thomas Moore with Moore's Irish melodies. Then records come along. They're new. They're fancy. They're exciting. They're very, very heavily promoted by the music industry. And who's one of the first superstars of the music industry? It's John McCormack. So going way back, we've got this extraordinary legacy, exactly as they say, John, of punching above our weight for a country that's small in size. But the downside of that is that we've always rested on those laurels. We're great. Look at our success. That's like, would a guy like me is always looking at, well, what's going to prepare the next wave of successes? Rather than thinking, hey, we're great. Let's just sit back. And have we been as successful in recent years as we were in the past? Do you think that in a way we've been found out or the deficiencies in our so-called record industry here have been found out? John, I wish you hadn't asked me that question because that's the key one. And the truth is we're still producing fabulous artists, but we had Hozier. Hozier went to number one in the States, so that's a recent success. We have fabulous bands. We have the Fontaines, DC, Murder Capital. We've now got black artists coming from Ireland. We've got a really good hip hop scene. But in terms of artists that have the kind of sales that Enia and U2 and the Cranberries, we don't have anyone at that tier at the moment. And that's definitely a danger sign. And what can we do to change that? It's easy to say there should be more record companies here. We should have a decent Irish record company or an Irish label of its own and not an offshoot of Universal or Sony or something. But I suppose those in the industry will say, well, it's just the market's not big enough to sustain one. Yeah, but then I would argue, look at New Zealand, similar population, very close to Australia in that case. And yet there's far more New Zealand acts in their local top 20, top 40 than Ireland. So you're completely right that it's easy to diagnose we're crap at the business of music. But there is one easy solution is go and see your friends' bands. Go and see if someone tells you that they're putting on a gig. And one thing that came out of the research for the book is that the Irish are extraordinarily brilliant and creative at lighting the little fires, at incubating the little baby bands. We've a hundred year history of doing absolutely brilliant things that help a band go from what do we do next. We don't have any fans and getting them on that road so that by the time the record labels globally become interested in them, they're ready to go. And obviously you too is a great example of that. But so is Enya and people in this country don't realise how successful Enya is. We have blind spots. Yeah, absolutely. You could go into a lobby in any hotel in any part of the world and hear some of Enya's music. And many's enact a look on end, obviously. Well, a lot of this we've been chatting about, analysed in the book. Sounds Irish, Axe Global is the name of the book explaining the success of Ireland's popular music industry co-author Michael Murphy. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.