E34 From Vinyl to Virtual The Evolution of Live DJ Music with Gav Pauze

00:00 - David Brown (Host)

aying jungle drum and bass in: 1995

01:15 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here.

01:18 - David Brown (Host)

It's for for the people listening. We've had a horrible technical issue trying to get all this stuff set up today, so it's a miracle we actually got all this together.

01:28

We made, it, we made it, but we did make it. We did make it. So, Gav, I met you only a few days ago actually it's last week through a friend that I have that I work with in my office. But you've got a massively inspirational story aside from you know, having worked in industry and been a DJ for a long time and worked with music, and obviously we want to talk about that. But maybe if you could give people a little bit of a background about you know, sort of sort of your story and how you got into DJing and that sort of thing, and then we'll we'll take the discussion from there.

02:05 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Yeah, so well, to start off with the DJing thing was just to get me off the streets and to keep me out of trouble originally, and then it's progressed further. I was lucky to team up with a couple of DJs that were signed to a record label, and I accidentally had to DJ one club night because one of the DJs couldn't make it, so I had to pretend to be him.

02:32 - David Brown (Host)

So those are the days mate. You know what I mean.

02:34 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

stuff like that. But then in: 2004

03:14

It is crazy, considering the time, quite literate now, like, but off the back of that it was really difficult because I couldn't. I couldn't do jungle music anymore because I found it too hectic. So I slotted into reggae, which you know jungle music is basically based off reggae and so that there's like a very close correlation of those two. And then I was given a radio show on a local pirate radio station and that's where my radio show was born and the positive side of reggae has actually helped me heal and you know it's helped with my speech because obviously you're on the radio and you're talking. Yeah, the positive messages in the music, it's uplifting, it's got really, I would say, healing properties in the frequencies of the music.

04:05

Well, okay, yeah Things have just built off the back of that.

04:09 - David Brown (Host)

Do you think, not to derail the conversation already, but do you think that's? Do you think people would be surprised by that that the, the lyrics of reggae and stuff like that are all very uplifting?

04:24 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

I don't know why.

04:25 - David Brown (Host)

I don't know why I would think that they wouldn't be. I'm just, it just seems. I don't know.

04:31 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Well, I used to be a chef, so the interesting thing is, there's a, there's a saying. There's a saying you are what you eat. Yeah, so we are what we consume. Then why not with words?

04:42 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, well, that's true, and we are what we listen to, I guess as well, exactly Because we.

04:47 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

You know, music inspires us, it motivates us, it can guide us down paths. You know we're forever learning as human beings. So if we're forever learning, then we're gonna learn from what we absorb, from what we consume. We absorb it. So, and I feel the same with music. You know, I don't really listen to anything. That's no positive, because I know the power that it has, and words are a powerful tool. Music is a powerful tool.

05:15 - David Brown (Host)

For sure. So can AI. Do you think AI will be able to do that? Let's just jump straight in. Can AI write powerful music? Do you think?

05:27 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

I feel that AI is all based off the human experience, because it's programmed by a human, so it's only going to take what humans can do and bring that forward to a degree I would have thought.

05:40 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, there's a lot of discussion about the creative aspect and I know our friend Keith, who you know he feels very strongly about this, that there's no way that AI can capture some elements of the human experience, even though it has essentially the entire body of human experience, of written human experience, to draw from. And, yeah, it's really interesting to see how it creates music and the way it goes about it, Because a lot, of, I think, music at its core, a lot of it it obviously is maths and it's understanding patterns and those sorts of things and from a probably from a pure mathematical standpoint, an algorithm could come up with something that logically sounds right.

06:26 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

But whether it tugs on the You're going to have the heart and soul Exactly, yeah, still going to have the heart and soul. When you're creating music, when you're in the studio, there's that energy going in that you're putting in, yeah, and I think that's what you lose. It's like, look, when you call a call centre and it's those automated AI messages that's listening. You know it gets frustrating and I think it's the same thing with you know, when you're doing creative work, you know you're going to. I mean I did a test with chat GPT against my poetry to see how well it would phase up to my poetry and line up and it just kept repeating the same words, right. So I don't think it's quite there yet.

07:13

I think the potential is. The potential is endless and in the right hands I think it can have a really positive impact. I do, but I do worry that it's going to make a lot of people redundant. That you know. I'm seeing it in my industry and in the DJ industry. As technology has progressed, the less people need the DJ in the definition of how it was when I first started. Obviously, we've reached through time and we have to adapt, but I do think that there's still quite a way for it to go, and I don't think it will ever get the exact same heart and soul that a human would put in no.

07:55 - David Brown (Host)

So, okay, let me bring it back to where we were in the conversation before. So that that's actually a good point, that to, I think, to jump in on this. So tell us about when you started and what it was like kind of DJing when you started and how, like, how has the technology progressed over the past 20 odd years? And you know, to get to where we are today, because I know there, you know, and you and I talked about this the other day, there have been a couple of major, I think, steps along the way, because it's totally different, like and I talked to my friend Mike Russell before and he's been more like a radio, he's been more involved in radio.

08:33

You know he talked about the fact where, you know, it used to be actual physical DJs in a radio station and they would come in and they'd sit down in the studio and they'd have a microphone in front of them and they'd put 45s on and they had to, you know, go pull them all ahead of time and they had to have their stack ready and you know, they'd play the songs and they'd talk in between, whereas now it's all electronic. You know you can record a four hour radio show, the human parts about 20 minutes and they just record that and everything else is automated. And I I know we talked about this and it's sort of the live, kind of the live aspect of it, and so if you could kind of talk about how you've seen it change over the years and what you think about that, that'd be amazing.

09:16 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

The change has been incredible. It really has like the difference from back when I first started DJing, where you you know as a as a club DJ, I would go to the record shops to go and listen to my records, for starters to see what I wanted to buy. And I miss that aspect. I miss that aspect so much of it. We call that crate digging, where you dig in the crates of records to find your hidden gems. You know, and we'd go every Monday when the new releases came into the record shop, there'd be a queue down the road waiting for the record shop to open and so everyone could get the best records.

09:51

s, towards the early: 2000

10:35 - David Brown (Host)

Can you still do that today?

10:38 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Yes, it's not the same. It's not the same because the problem with that is charity shops have wised up to oh, they might have a hidden gem here, they can put it on eBay. Yeah, so you've got that aspect of it. But also not as many people are getting rid of records because they've already got rid of them.

10:54 - David Brown (Host)

Right, yeah, that's fair enough. There's a. Well, you know, you probably know, locally there's even flow.

11:01 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

It's a coffee shop, but they have records and they sell records they don't do anything, unless I want to buy Bob Marley, which for me, yeah, reggae is Bob Marley, but I'm nice to commercial for what I do.

11:16 - David Brown (Host)

I was in the one and the new, smaller one in the mall and they had a I think they had a copy of Pink Floyd the Wall and they wanted 90 quid for it.

11:27 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

And I was just like yeah, no. I don't think so. No, but it's actually worth an original first press.

11:34 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, I'm sure.

11:36 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

As long as it's in good condition, you know, and I mean, the price that records are going for now is crazy.

11:42 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah.

11:43 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

I've run the record shop and we've got seven inch singles, up to 30, 40 pound each, you know, and they're brand new. It's just because they're a limited press, yeah, yeah, they're rare and hard to find, you know. So I mean that is another aspect that's changed. You know, vinyl isn't mass produced on the same level that it used to be, you know. But bringing in a good, a good aspect of this, of how the industry has changed, is, you know, obviously, working with Reggae.

12:11

k in back in the nineties and: 2000

13:07

I had an artist the other day send me his new album that's coming out next month saying can I have your opinion? And the first thing I said was is it going to be released on vinyl and CD? And he was like, well, nobody's buying that anymore. You know, yeah, I mean, he's correct to a degree, but he's also not correct, because people are buying it but it's specialist. So having to select people, it's a massively reduced amount. But the problem with that is artists aren't making money from their albums.

13:38 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, Well, I guess that becomes. I guess the logical sort of conclusion of that is that what happens is that becomes like a special VIP thing that you released later, right? So you get the music out in the beginning, you sort of gauge the reaction of people like it and whatever. And then you say, okay, we're going to do a run of 300, you know, or 500, you know vinyl.

14:00

Yeah, they're expensive to do but they have a premium price right, and that's the whole thing. So you say, well, this is going to be a premium, vip sort of thing. So you know, if you want it, it's a special edition. And you know, get them to autograph it or whatever.

14:14 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

And then you can do it that way or number it the numbers thing works, like you know, having, you know, say you've done a press of 30, having them one to 30 numbered, because that's then it comes as item, then the price goes up again. But it's not all about the price, it's all about the quality of the music as well, and there's a lot of music out there that I call throwaway music, where you know it's not timeless. Like with roots, reggae. The music tends to be timeless, a lot of it and you know you can play a song from 30 years ago and you still think it's new today because it's timeless. But there's a lot of music being made there that not just probably in every genre where people have forgotten about the tune a month, two months down the line, because the vast amount of music as well that's being released and this is the problem with the new technology is because so much music is out there, the markets become flooded, and that's one of the real downsides to this generation of music is a lot of it is throwaway.

15:21

Now, back in: 2012

16:09 - David Brown (Host)

That studio time is expensive as well, wasn't it?

16:12 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Exactly. And to be an artist, you had to have something special. Now I can't sing to save my life. Now I could go in the studio and I could do a song and I could have it released by tomorrow. Yeah, that's the difference. So the modern technology it's good in that sense, you know, and no longer do you need to be, like, have money behind you to record. Yeah, that's good, because the artists that don't have that, that are not getting the breaks, can record. Yeah, but then right, and I don't mean to offend anybody, but then you've literally got people that can't sing release the music.

16:49 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, doesn't make sense to me, no, so so to go back a little bit, so obviously you started when it was, you know, 12 inch vinyl or seven inch vinyl or whatever, and then you'd sort of progressed. And then I guess you. But but from what I remember you telling me before is that you always like to use vinyl and you never progress. But the industry as a whole sort of moved off of vinyl on to what did? Did the mixing boards change and the hardware and everything changed with it. So all that technology changed as well, right?

17:21 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

It has. Yes, I mean you now have an mp3 controller as your, as your main DJ tool. I don't like that. I have big hands. I like the feel of the vinyl. I like that. That that was always part of DJing to me was spinning the records and getting it at the sleeve, put it on, putting the stylus on the on the vinyl and queuing it up and beat mixing together. That that I would never lose, that love.

17:49

in the nineties had Technics: 1210

19:01 - David Brown (Host)

So where does AI fit into that? Now, like, what's the difference with? You know, so you, so we've gone from vinyl to CD to MP3. And you know we've got. These are what the guys have been doing, I. So how does AI factor into that and what aspects do you think AI? Where is AI going to have the biggest impact?

19:23 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Well, it's already having an impact, because I was talking to someone the other day and they're like oh, my Spotify DJ is brilliant. My Spotify DJ is brilliant. I'm like, yeah, but I'm a DJ. Do you listen to my show? Oh, no, my Spotify DJ is better. I'm like, oh, thanks, thanks. I've known you for 15 years and you're telling me that you know your favorite DJ is a Spotify DJ and that is AI. You know, like I mean, there's so many problems that it causes AI, but there's so many good aspects too. I mean, one of the problems that I've had recently and over the past like five or six years is the I'm not sure if it is AI, but the thing that runs YouTube, or seeing whose song that you've got on your YouTube channel and then accrediting that person. That's classed as AI, basically, isn't it. Now I've put some of my radio show mixers on YouTube and it accredited some of the reggae artists' songs to pop artists, so it got it wrong.

20:27 - David Brown (Host)

Interesting.

20:28 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

So the pop art. You know, one of my videos got 1.5 million views, so the reggae artist that I played wasn't getting the royalties for that song being played. It was going to Britney Spears.

20:42 - David Brown (Host)

Wow, was it a song that? Was it the same song? Or did she sing some part of that song, or is it just totally different?

20:48 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Totally different, totally different, and I've had it happen quite a few times. This is why I kind of stopped using YouTube a bit, because I was like, well, I'm playing these artists' songs and they're not getting paid for it, someone else's yeah. Like how is that fair? That doesn't make sense to me.

21:03 - David Brown (Host)

Which is interesting because, considering what Spotify did recently, where they basically stopped paying a whole lot of artists for you know which also brings in your comment about everybody can make music now and I think that's what was happening on Spotify is they had all these accounts. Albeit, a lot of them were the I don't know if anybody knows about this, but there's all these ASMR accounts, which is basically like noises, like someone rubbing their fingers together or someone erasing with a pencil Pen-a-bike.

21:34

Yeah or whatever, right, and they record these sounds for like hours and then they would put them up on Spotify and then you know they were playing them or people were playing them and listening to them as kind of white noise, I guess, I don't know. I never got into the ASMR thing. I've seen some of the videos. I totally don't get it. But anyway, you know Spotify was losing a lot of money by paying royalties for this sort of stuff or for people who obviously you know they weren't a band and they weren't doing something, but they just created a bunch of sound files that they put on Spotify and were making money off of that. So Spotify has done something to try and rectify that a little bit. So there now is a minimum threshold, I think, for how you qualify to actually be, you know, to get revenue from the platform, whereas I think everybody used to get it.

22:25

And I know YouTube is tightened up. I mean, I'm not a YouTuber. I put a lot of stuff on YouTube, like I put clips of these shows and stuff on YouTube and I have my own personal channel that I do, which is just a daily diary, but I don't do that for views, I do that for practice for me, so that I can develop my skill and get better. So I'm not into monetizing anything, but I do see a lot of videos where you know YouTube has been tightening down quite a lot on that as well and changing the algorithm. So I think they're trying.

22:58 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Trying to get better, but then it's come from a human perspective, doesn't it? You know, the way that they're getting better is by the humans altering. You know what I mean. Humans are in control now For them to have started this. It was humans that started it, so it's the human error that's kind of come into this, because there's always going to in, no matter what you do, there's always going to be some aspect of something that you don't quite think about properly.

23:28

And I think music has been sacrificed a lot, you know, in the whole digital revolution. That's happened Now, you know, like I said, it's good in some aspects because you know, a song is recorded in Jamaica and I can be playing it on my radio show the next day. That is a really, really good aspect, instead of having to wait three, four, five, six, maybe seven weeks, sometimes six months, before you get a song. That's new, you know. So that has opened it up. But it's about figuring out if the upsides outweigh the downsides or if it balances it out.

24:03 - David Brown (Host)

I think about the time that I went on a cruise and I was just trying to think of the date when that must have been, that must have been 80, sorry, 90, let's call it 95. 96, 95, 96, somewhere around there mid 90s, and I went on a cruise, and it was a sort of Western Caribbean thing. So we stopped in Jamaica, and I remember and since we're talking about rare gay music, I think this is relevant but we had the whole family, whatever and my wife and I at the time, we got in a car, we got in a taxi, and we basically just said to the guy look, we wanna go somewhere cool, we might wanna have a smoke or something, so can you help us out? The guy was like, yeah, I need to pick up somebody along the way, but I can sort you out, and I was like okay, cool. What we ended up doing, though, is we ended up just riding around with him in the taxi all day literally picking up, and I was a party in itself.

25:04 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Yeah, picking up fares.

25:06 - David Brown (Host)

So we were picking up fares, literally taking them wherever they wanted to go, and we just hung with him all day. But what's relevant to this conversation was the music and what was really cool and the thing that stood out the most about this for me was there was so much cool, rare gay music that I just never heard before, because in the US at that time and I lived in the South like the only reggae you ever heard was maybe some Bob Marley.

25:34

That was it, the commercial side, you'd never heard anyone else, and just going down there and actually hearing all this other stuff and if you ask me any of the names I can't tell you, but I just remember it did make a massive impression on me at the time. So I can imagine what those artists back then, how difficult it was, because they were like playing to their own audience in Jamaica, and the tourists that came down there who went, wow, this is incredible, can I buy a CD or an album and then they take it home with them and it would be some really super cool music that people would play at a party. But it kind of never went any further than that, whereas now, going back to the Spotify playlist and all that sort of stuff, like it's much more discoverable today, I guess, even though there's tons more of it.

26:23 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

But there's a problem it's fishing through it all.

26:25 - David Brown (Host)

It is yeah.

26:26 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

No, it's the same with when my book was published. I was like, oh brilliant, I'm a published author. But then you go on Amazon, look how many other published authors there are and it's wading through, it's sifting out the wheat from the shaft and that is the problem, because when people are given too much choice, then that then becomes a problem. It has a detrimental effect and I think that has it's certainly in the music industry and in the publishing industry, like books and stuff. It has a detrimental effect because not everyone that has the talent is getting heard. Now it's whoever's got the biggest social media following or whoever's got the biggest fan base. If you're nobody, and you've written this really great book or you've done this really really good song, how's it gonna get out there? It's very, very difficult because there's so much stuff out there. So again, it's weighing up those pros and cons.

27:25 - David Brown (Host)

And I think today it's all about manipulating not manipulating the algorithm, but understanding how the algorithms work and then trying to work around it. So I do a lot, I watch a lot on podcasts and YouTube and all that sort of stuff, just because I'm trying to understand how the media landscape works. And what's really interesting is their thought is don't get somebody who's really interesting on and have a conversation with them. What you have to do is you have to have your thumbnail built and designed already and your title designed already, and then you have conversations that match those things, because that's what you're interested in and you have to have your keywords.

28:07

Yeah, and it's almost backwards from what it used to be. It used to be or you had an idea, you knew what you wanted to do. You'd go do that thing and then you'd create all the assets afterwards, and now you have to create the assets that are gonna get highlighted by the algorithm and then you can work out the content that goes off the back of it. So, yeah, it's totally back to front.

28:29 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Essentially, the algorithm is writing the story.

28:32 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, in a way, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's. We've got all these search engine optimization and all this other stuff that you can do and you can look and if you're a YouTuber, I guess, or you're a musician and you want to get as many listens and as many downloads and whatever is possible, there's all these tools. You can go and you can use Google and you can see what people are searching for and you can see what kinds of music they want and all that. But that takes the creativity out of it, because now you're making a song to meet an audience need instead of writing an emotion Like. I don't think Adele thought anything about that when she sat down and wrote someone like you.

29:13 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Right, not because the song comes first.

29:17 - David Brown (Host)

That was never thought in her head.

29:19 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Yeah, exactly, and that is part of what I'm saying as well. It's just to me it's strange that a creative is being stopped being their true creative, their true self, because they're trying to fit into what's trending. You know, I've seen it with YouTubers. Where a YouTuber will? I'm sure they don't want to be doing that, I'm sure they want to be talking about history because that's what their channel is about. But they're not. They're doing this so they can catch that, the algorithm and get the views. Otherwise they ain't getting no views. And that's a real problem because it's taking the creative out of the creative and you're losing the heart and soul of, and the purpose of, why you're actually creating.

30:04 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, 100% Okay. So we've had a little bit of a break and enforced technical break and now we're back In part two, I guess we could call this. I was thinking about two main questions. Sort of one is what are the warning signs, Like what are you worried about with AI and how AI is gonna impact sort of the music industry and music in general, and then what are the advantages? And I'm a glass half full kind of guy, so let's end on the positive. So let's talk about the negatives first.

30:44 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Well, the main thing is taking the creative out of the creative industry and people losing their jobs. It's already happening. It's been happening with DJing for years and that is a major worry, where people who have practiced their trade for a very long time, you know, got very good at what they do and suddenly they can't get work and then they're going to have to go and work for I mean, it happened during the pandemic in the reggae industry lots of artists had to go out and work for Amazon and Uber and Deliveroo and stuff like that, and you know they've trained to be musicians for 20, 30 years and then now they're not musicians because of that. So that is my worry with AI and massively is it decimating jobs and how people meant to earn a living.

31:34 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, Is it really? Is it really that good? I mean, I don't, I don't. I haven't looked into any specialist tools to do sort of mixing like a DJ would do, and I assume I guess there's tools out there that do that. Yeah, Are they good?

31:51 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Well, the tools that you can buy, so the, the controllers that you buy for mixing MP3s, you can automate it. It just does it itself. So it's taking the DJ out of DJ and that takes the heart and soul out of it. Because you know, obviously with that it's a set mechanism that they've got that does it. You know, you know it's not the signature. So as a DJ I've got a signature where you know I'll cut the music across with the crossfader, so it's going in and out of one and the other. Yeah, it's not, it doesn't quite work like that, it's more of like a linear kind of standard thing. So it means that everything becomes the same, you know, and that's not good because you're taking that, that personal touch out of it, and that is, that is a major worry. But it's the, the loss, the, the, the job losses that that, that that are already happening.

32:44

So you can't replace that because once, once it's there, it's there, it's not going to go away and we're suddenly going to have this resurgence. There might be a little bit of a resurgence, just like with people purchasing vinyl. You know that's massively up nowadays from what it was a few years back. So you might get those little resurgence, but it's not the same. You know, and taking out the human experience of creative industry, I think that's quite dangerous to a degree.

33:15 - David Brown (Host)

And how so people are losing jobs already, like DJs and stuff. So are you seeing a few, a lot fewer opportunities than there used to be?

33:25 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Or, or like A lot of money Are the people that used to like.

33:29 - David Brown (Host)

What instances? Is that Because I imagine that things like weddings and stuff like that they still have live DJs? Or is that something that these tools are replacing because it's cheaper to just?

33:39 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

get. It's cheaper. It's cheaper, easier you can have it more like like specifically programmed for where you're liking, I mean it's. It removes a lot of the that aspect out of it, and I do see that happening a lot. I do see, you know, instead of getting a DJ to come and do their wedding, they'll just stick on an iPod, it's like with a Spotify playlist.

34:05

It's like OK, yeah, you know, and in these times as well, when the economy hasn't been that great, people are looking to save money.

34:14

Why, you know, for me, as a vinyl DJ, I would charge a lot for me to go and play at a gig, and this is why I don't really do gigs anymore, because people aren't willing to pay that, because not only have you got the AI aspect of it, but you've got all these other people that are having been DJing for that long and they've just downloaded some music online.

34:37

So that's pushed the prices down. So it's actually happened in the same way that the technology has moved the habits of how people, you know, having all these new DJs come through. Nothing wrong with that, because some of them are very, very good and some of them have embraced technology to the full and using it to their advantage. But then you know, and it's probably people will say, yeah, you're just out of the time, You're not kept up with the times. But then why should I, when it's something that I love and I'm passionate about? Why should I change that aspect of how I do things just to fit with the technology? Because then I'm not being true to myself as being a vinyl lover and a vinyl DJ.

35:19 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, 100%. Where do you think so that I don't? Know, this is going to really show my age. But where does the like, where does the next sort of Tiesto or Armand Van Buren or one of that? Like you know, like those are older now DJs, right, like they were like 15 years ago.

35:36 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Right, let's still get bookings because of their name.

35:40 - David Brown (Host)

maybe, and that was the early: 2000

36:20 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Yeah, 100%, 100% and they probably probably a lot of those, a lot of the bigger heads and bigger names and stuff probably still do, still do. Because you're able to put your own signature, touch on it, and this is where the AI things and the AI assistant and stuff like that, it removes that personal touch. So as a DJ, you have a brand, you have a style of mixing. It's like with a music producer or a singer they have their specific signature tone or style and I think AI kind of loses that aspect of it.

36:59 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, I totally get you and I guess that was going to be. My other question is if you go somewhere like the big clubs and Ibiza and stuff and I know a couple of the big clubs have actually closed down recently because people aren't going as much anymore Because, frankly, the financial crisis is hitting everybody everywhere and those clubs are massively expensive to go to. If you wanted to take it, it was 60 or 80 quid just to get in and then on top of that or more. And so if you were going to be, like a DJ, I guess, in residence over a summer season or something, then it would make sense to take all your vinyl with you and something like that, where you knew you were going to have a gig that was going to be ongoing over several months and maybe you even lived there and it was local to you or whatever. But that seems like that probably makes sense. But, like we said, for anybody that's up and coming, they're not going to have the ability to do that, even if they want to.

37:54 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

But then a lot of clubs don't have turntables in. Now you bring your own control.

37:59 - David Brown (Host)

You have to bring your own.

38:01 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, and I mean bringing a controller and a hard drive is a lot easier than carrying 12 hours of vinyl for mixing, because that's a lot of vinyl that you need for that. Do you know what I mean? So you know. And then there's the logistics of carrying vinyl, so making it easier to just jump in on a plane with a laptop and a hard drive and your controller, blam, blam done. You know, it's not like looking. I remember back in the 90s coming down to London to DJ at a house party in Stoke Newington and I was on the tube coming down those really long escalators and I had two record bags over each shoulder, like Chris crossed and I lost my balance and I was about to fall but my brother caught my bag. I pulled my bag.

38:48 - David Brown (Host)

That was lucky, because that would have not been a good time.

38:52 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

You know. But you know carrying around that sort of vinyl, you know it's not like you can pack up your turntables and then go and plug that into a sound system in a club it doesn't work like that. It's a lot more difficult in logistic terms, you know. So I mean it is easier, you know, just having it on a hard drive and having your music like that. But then there's also the loss of sound quality, because if you're playing MP3 over WAV, like WAV files, or MP3 is a compressed file, then you know you're playing that through a big sound system. You're going to hear a different sound than you would a vinyl or a CD or a WAV file, because of the sound loss that's done in compression. So there's that aspect of it and some of not all of them, because I don't want to offend anyone, but some of the new DJs that are coming through don't kind of understand that.

39:45

d I've been in a club back in: 2016

40:25 - David Brown (Host)

But it's still not between the wall.

40:27 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Yeah, you get that extra on the bassline frequencies of air, but you don't get that warmth that the vinyl creates, you know.

40:36 - David Brown (Host)

Well, that's because the vinyl is a physical. It's started by a physical movement, isn't it? Yeah, and that makes all the difference. And it's quite interesting. It's also like we took my son to his first sort of concert recently and it was really, really interesting to see his reaction to live music, because, of course, he'd never heard live music before. And seeing a band perform live is totally different than listening to it on YouTube or on TV or whatever. That experience of feeling the bass coming from the speakers and the atmosphere, yeah, the energy of the other people in the room. And we actually went to see a band called Heilung, which is a German kind of Nordic band, and they call it a ritual actually Shout out to Heilung. We love Heilung, but it's something completely different. If you've never heard of them, I'll send you a link afterwards.

41:39 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

I would be interested to see that and you can check it out.

41:42 - David Brown (Host)

But it's all very tribal and they do sort of a war dance to start and they kind of purify the place you get a whole experience.

41:52

It's a massive, massive experience. It's one of the best. I mean I've seen some of the best, biggest bands in the world Rolling Stones, all that sort of stuff throughout my whole life and I went to this concert in Hammersmith in London and it was one of the top probably five shows I've ever seen in my life. So we've totally ruined him for any other live music Because he just went to that and was just awestruck the whole time, which was amazing.

42:17 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Because he's got the best out of that human experience.

42:21

Again, it's creating that human experience. It's like if you go and see a DJ live, it's so much different from what you'd see on YouTube or Twitch or whatever you know, because there's the atmosphere. You know, you're hearing the frequencies, the true frequencies of the bass lines, the treble, everything. It creates something inside and I think, on going back to the AI thing, I think this is what AI kind of removes a lot of that experience. I mean, what is it? The Abatour? Where is it called? Voyage or something?

42:56 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah.

42:56 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

That's not the same as having humans on stage. I'm sorry, but it's not.

43:01 - David Brown (Host)

They're doing it with Elvis now as well.

43:03 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

It's just no, it's just anything to make money. That's what that seems like to me. Yeah, it does. Whereas it might pull in a pretty penny for the consumer, the person that's listening, it's not going to be the same as going to see someone live. It's actually live on stage that can actually react to the crowd, because you've got that aspect to it as well.

43:26 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, 100%. So is well to be slightly controversial. Is AI the death of live DJing, do you think?

43:34 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

No, I don't think there'll ever be a death of live DJing. Personally, I don't. You know. I think there's a balance, but I think the balance is skew-wift at the moment. I don't think it's. I think this is because it's in its emphase as well. I think that has a lot to do with it. I think there has to be a balanced stroke that benefits both sides of the coin. At the moment, I think it's. You know, ai, it's new, you know. I think as it gets better, I think also, a lot of people will get bored of it, to be fair because people already are a little bit.

44:11

There we go. I mean, look at what happened with iTunes when they released that song, where it was totally AI generated.

44:21 - David Brown (Host)

Well, I did a presentation a while back and it was. You know, it's sort of the hype curve and I think late last year we were at the peak of the hype curve and I think really it seems like over the holidays everybody's had a chance to sort of take a break, to step back away from work and all the mania and reading all the articles and all that sort of stuff and it seems that we're on the downward slope into the trough of disillusionment. And I think, you know, there are a few lawsuits that are open at the minute. So, you know, microsoft and Open AI are being sued famously by the New York Times and there's some independent authors that are suing them.

45:02 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

There's now a case coming from visual artists as well and so it's interesting to see the results of that and how that impacts on how people think Exactly.

45:15 - David Brown (Host)

But it's also going to impact potentially on the quality of the models that are trained as well. The cynical side of me says that those people don't really care. All they want as money. So it's just a play to get more money. It's not an artistic integrity argument, it's a you're not paying for it argument. So I think they'll strike a deal at some point and then everybody will just move on. But yeah, it's interesting. So I think you know we'll have some impacts there. So the rate at which AI is developing may slow down just a little bit because of access to data, but it's going to be. It's going to be interesting to see. Where do you? So where do you I'm conscious of time now because we're pushing on a little bit when do you see the positives?

46:08 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

So there's so many positives like I'll take an example we don't use much AI and pause radio. Now I feel bad that I think that we should do with with the pause radio website. But one thing I did do is I did some tests where, you know, we do a lot of PR work for reggae artists where we write biographies, we write reviews and press releases. Now, for a new artist I wouldn't have been able to do this because there's not enough information online for a new artist to write a biography. But I got some old school artists and I got AI, chat, gpt to write a biography for them and it was scarily accurate, apart from the name, the birth date and the birthplace. So obviously I still had to go through and edit it. Yeah, yeah, right. But when I put those on on the website as a test and I've only done two as a test and they got a good number of hits, you know, and it's still getting hits now and I will use AI in future and I'm sure there's other aspects, and this is something that I'm kicking myself with because, because I'm a little bit behind on the times I'm sure there's other aspects. We can kind of implement AI into pause radio. That will benefit me.

47:23

And as a sole trader, you know, I think AI can be massively helpful to my business doing jobs that I can't really afford to get people to do, you know, like menial jobs I can't think of hand, but I'm sure there's stuff where that I can implement that will benefit me and take some of the pressure off me so I can still create my radio shows, you know, manage the shop, you know, and do all the other things that I do and have AI doing that. So this is the positive side of it is it can take a what as a small business owner it can save me money on instead of having to employ somebody. And I think that's something I really need to look into in the next like five, six months, you know, down the line, maybe this year is, implement some of that and see what can benefit. Pause radio for the better.

48:14 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, and there's, there's so many tools and there's so many things. In so many ways, I think we're we're other people that I've talked to have seen a lot of advantages through automating processes that you couldn't really automate in the past. But now the AI or machine learning or whatever, it's just the tech behind the scenes, but everybody's calling everything AI these days, but it's just a series of API is really. But you know, you can connect and say well, if I, if I drop a post in here, it could even be a Google doc or something like that and you can say if I add a new Google doc, then the system sees the new Google doc and then it takes that content, puts you know, sends it to chat. Gpt says edit, this, takes the results of that, puts it into a different file. Then it, you know, creates 10 social media posts, put that, sends it to your social media posting tool, schedules all the put like it. It can create music for those.

49:10

it can create images for those posts as well. So it can go off to mid journey or dally or something like that, and it can say create an image based on this article or this post, and then it'll create an image. And then it will take all of that stuff, put it together, put it on the like. It's insane the amount of stuff that you can do If you really, you know, spend the time to dig into it and all that.

49:31

But it's I think that's where those jobs are going to come in is it's going to change from people doing those individual bits of work to, you know, kids like, like my son, when he starts to work and he gets into the workplace like I don't know if he's interested in this, but I'll just use him as an example but he could be one of those people that could learn how to set up those processes for businesses. So he would just turn into a consultant or he would work for a company that could just set up these really complex workflows. That would then automate the whole process. So you just have you know, you have one author who writes one story and then that's it once. Once they submit that story or they just save it, as all they have to do is save it as a document and as soon as they save it, everything.

50:16 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

That's such a positive. That is such a positive for like for me, where what I'm finding is, because of the there's, I don't really do the live DJ gigs anymore. I don't have that income. I'm having to do other things. And then, because of what happened with the economy I hate to say it, but Brexit kind of did damages very much and because of that, I then had to set up the PR company to make up for the money that we lost through sales of going to the EU, because we lost what? 96% of our sales.

50:50

But I'm always finding that I'm spread over so many things. It takes me away from the creating that I want to do and that is a problem. So, if I can, you know, implement AI into everyday processes that I do, to take some of that away from me so I can get back to the creating, that would be fantastic and I think that's what I need to look into and that's what you know. At the start of this year, I thought, right, this is what I'm going to do. You know, always have plans for you know the year, always have plans for you know the next five years, like that kind of thing, and you know, implementing more AI would be, I think, beneficial to me because it will help me have more of a kind of creative. Get back to the creative side of things.

51:33

Now we already have, like automation with our shop side of things where, you know, we have this abandoned cart plugin, where if someone abandons their cart on the shop, it then, you know, waits a bit of time and then it says, ok, they've not purchased that. They send them an email. That kind of automation. So having more things like that to you know, bring in traffic and to bring people back if they've, you know, forgotten. Oh, I forgot this. I put like 100 pounds worth of vinyl in my basket on Paul's radio. Oh, I got an email. They're offering me a discount. Fantastic, yeah.

52:06 - David Brown (Host)

No, it's fair enough.

52:07 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

of kicking myself for back in: 2013

52:37 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah.

52:39 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

So I can't get left behind with AI because I learned my lesson. I learned my lesson then because that in the penguin update, that had a massive effect on us because we couldn't just change the website straight away, because we didn't have the funds to do it at that time. Yeah, and so the penguin update really punished us because that was then focusing on. You know, if someone was searching on Google on their phone, it would show them mobile responsive websites first. So the penguin upside update really, really did cause damage to our traffic. I think if I can implement AI more into and not get left behind like I have done previously, then I think it's just going to.

53:20 - David Brown (Host)

You know, it's a win-win situation and I think that's a positive, you know 100%, and some of the design tools will be really good at that, because you will be able to design for whatever, and, whether you do mobile first or web first, your desktop first and then you can say I need you to also design this for mobile, and it makes that transition a lot easier. I mean, I use a tool that is really called Webflow to design web pages and stuff, but I always do desktop first, but it has all the different breakpoints in it and so it's really easy to see, so you can check all the stuff as it goes along. And it usually needs a bit of tweaking and you have to move stuff around and it doesn't always look right, but it makes that process quite simple, but I never can get it to work exactly the way I want it to. So I would love to have an AI where I could just say, ok, can you just make this look OK on mobile, and it would just do it.

54:15 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

now, back in the in the early: 2000

54:56 - David Brown (Host)

Like but don't get like behind, yeah, you know behind yeah because it's not nice being left behind. And striking that balance is real, and I think this is what a lot of these conversations are about us that I've had is is how do we strike this balance between, you know, still making progress and moving ahead yet? Not moving quickly that we, that we break everything along the way and who decides what?

55:20 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

what balance is right?

55:22 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, well there is.

55:23 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

That's the hard thing, that's the thing, yeah, awesome.

55:28 - David Brown (Host)

there. So my new question for: 2024

55:45 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Do you want to be honest? Truth, yeah, to be totally truthful, yeah. Yeah. I had to contact a very well-known sports brand that I'm not going to mention because I don't want to give them advertisement.

55:57 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, fine.

55:58 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Yeah, and it put me through to an automated system and I would go mental at it because, oh, I want to speak to a human being, and it drove me up the wall.

56:09 - David Brown (Host)

But like chat GPT, if you're just using chat GPT on your own, do you, are you polite to it? Like you're talking to another person, Do you? And do you say I've done a lot of?

56:19 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

tests. So I've tried everything. I've tried everything because I want to, I'm curious, I want to know how these things work. Like I say, I don't want to get left behind again. So I've put in loads of different things into chat, gpt I've tried being polite. I've been horrible to it, I've been medium, I've been standoffish.

56:40 - David Brown (Host)

You just got to test these things out to see how they are. The reason I ask this question is is because I read an article where there was a lady who was talking about when she gets the code assist, the co-pilot tool to help her fix code, Like she might have something that's not working for whatever reason and she'll put it in there and she'll use a debugging and whatever. And she said she has this sense of gratitude when it fixes stuff for her that she would normally.

57:11

I know, but she still has the feeling of, because that's what the feeling of gratitude comes from you, not from the other thing.

57:19 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Right, but that's what's in her heart, so that makes sense.

57:22 - David Brown (Host)

So she feels the gratitude, but she doesn't know what to do with it, cause normally you would be like, oh my God, that's so amazing. Thank you for helping me with that. I've been working on that for eight, right? But she's like I can't do that, or should I do that? And I just thought it was a really, really interesting question, and some people I've talked to again, this is, this, is not this sort of. The results are similar to this other question I'll ask you in a minute, but it's. There seem to be two camps, but in this question it seems to be about 70 or 80% of the people at the minute seem to want to treat it politely, like it's a person, because everybody seems to say that when they take over, at least they'll go well. He was nice to me.

58:05 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

That's interesting and I'm not gonna kill them because they were nice to me. I don't see it. I don't see AI as being human. There's no human. There's no human in AI for me. So you know, it doesn't matter how I speak to it, I don't.

58:20

I'm probably that 20% where you know like a human to me is the one that's face to face with me or I'm on the phone or whatever, like say on Zoom or whatever or whatever. Having that human element there, that's a lot different to me, Whereas AI don't class it as human. I never will do Like it doesn't matter if they're killers, They'll kill us all anyway. It doesn't matter what it's got stored in its memory banks.

58:48 - David Brown (Host)

So I guess there's no point in asking you if you think it's male or female.

58:54 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

I would think it's a they-them other A they-them okay. Or it prefers not to say yeah.

59:02 - David Brown (Host)

And if you have not if, but when you have your AI personal assistant that does all of those tasks for you, like pays your bills and does all the stuff that you don't want to do, what do you think you'll call it?

59:14 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Well, everyone's either called John or Dave, aren't they? So it's called John or Dave.

59:19 - David Brown (Host)

So it's male. Yeah, so it's male. There you go.

59:22 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

Possible, possible. You see, I find it very hard to push you to. I think it's very kind of not dangerous, but I think it's very strange to push a human element to these things. It's like giving a cat or a dog a human name, you know.

59:41 - David Brown (Host)

Those are creepy. I don't understand that. No, it's really creepy. It's really creepy when, probably why would you have?

59:47 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

a cat? Why would you have a dog called Gary and why would you have a cat called Kate it? Doesn't make any sense, yeah, yeah.

59:53 - David Brown (Host)

They're not human.

59:55 - Gav Pauze (Guest)

I'll give you a human name.

59:56 - David Brown (Host)

Right, thank you, gav. That was awesome. That was an amazing conversation. Let's let everybody know. So I know. Let's make sure that everybody understands that pause radio is P-A-U-Z-E right.

:: 00:11

Yes, exactly.

:: 00:12

Radiocom, and your books can be found on Amazon.

:: 00:18

So pause for thought. You can buy it on the website, and it's better buying it on the website. Don't buy it on Amazon, but you can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it on Waterstones, but yeah, the book is also on my website as well. Pause for thought. Spelt with a Zed again as well.

:: 00:37

So all reputable booksellers, but please buy it directly from the website.

:: 00:41

Don't buy Amazon Awesome.

:: 00:46

And is there anything else you'd like to promote, or if you've got anything coming up that's coming up soon.

:: 00:53

I've just started buying 2024 vinyl stock, like reggae stock, for the website, so I'd love to plug my record shop on the website. Go on there, pick up yourself some deals. We are a very reasonable priced vinyl shop. Awesome. We ship all over the world, that's not a problem. Okay, and yeah, we are, like I say, promoting the vinyl, promoting the book, promoting my radio show. Those three things are the main things I'm working on at the moment. So, thank you.

:: 01:21

Brilliant. Okay, well, and I'll put links to your social media handles and stuff like that and obviously to the website, and links to everything will be in the show notes when this comes out.

:: 01:29

So this is.

:: 01:31

Monday. This will be out this Friday so people don't have to wait too long to catch up. But yeah, awesome, that was an amazing conversation. Thanks very much for your time this afternoon.

:: 01:41

It's been a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

:: 01:43

Cheers. We'll speak to you soon. Bye-bye.

:: 01:45

Thank you, thank you.