Beyond Category: How Three Music Writers Navigate a Genre-Fluid World

Michelle Zeto, Geoffrey Himes, and Rob Shepherd have each built careers in music journalism and broadcasting. They discuss how genre categories shape both criticism and listening, the difference between being a savant and a polymath, and whether the post-genre world is liberating or limiting. The conversation explores the role of critics as translators, the rise of playlist culture, and why attention spans may not be as new a problem as we think.

In this episode, we explore: 

• How musicians themselves often resist the "jazz" label—and what that means for writers 
• Why shorter attention spans might not be the crisis we think 
• The tension between consumer advisor and cultural translator 
• What human curation offers that algorithms can't 
• Whether broad knowledge serves critics better than deep specialization

Learn more about our guests:

• Michelle Zeto and "Jammin' Jazz" 
• Geoffrey Himes and "Hard Rain and Pink Cadillacs"
• Rob Shepherd and PostGenre.org

Our host:

• Lawrence Peryer

And our organization, the Jazz Journalists Association. 

Take a look at the Jazz Omnibus, the 600-page anthology of 21st century photos and writings by members of the Jazz Journalist Association, available online and wherever books are sold

Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.

For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to The Buzz, the podcast of the Jazz Journalists Association. I'm Lawrence Peryer, managing editor of The Buzz and your host today for a discussion on how genre categories function as both tools and constraints, the challenges and opportunities of writing across musical boundaries, and what gets lost—and gained—when we stop worrying about what to call the music. It is a conversation that explores why shorter attention spans may not be the crisis, or as recent a development, that we think they are, and what role critics play in an increasingly algorithm-driven landscape.

Listeners to this podcast know that jazz has always resisted easy definition. From its earliest days, the music drew from blues, African drumming, and European classical traditions. Today, that expansive spirit continues as artists pull from funk, rock, world music, electronic sounds, and beyond. But what does this mean for the writers and critics who cover the music?

For this episode, we've gathered three music journalists whose careers reflect jazz's boundary-crossing nature. Each has navigated the professional terrain between deep specialization and broad exploration, and each has found their own answer to the question: What counts as jazz, and does it matter?

Michelle Zeto has spent 25 years as a DJ and programmer, from XM Radio's Beyond Jazz channel to WDCB in Chicago to KBEM Jazz88 in Minneapolis. Her show, Jammin' Jazz, champions what she calls "Jazz for the New Generation" and it’s music that's eclectic, danceable, and unapologetically draws from diverse influences. Her tagline says it all: "Not Your Parents' Jazz."

Geoffrey Himes has written about music for over 45 years, contributing to the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Paste, DownBeat, and dozens of other publications. He's won the Deems Taylor Award four times and has covered everything from Bob Dylan to Solomon Burke to Steely Dan. His career spans the full spectrum of American music, with jazz as a constant thread.

Rob Shepherd runs PostGenre.org, a website dedicated to music that stretches beyond preset boxes. He’s also an attorney, accountant, and saxophonist who restores vintage horns. His focus is on works that don't fit neatly into any single genre or style, taking inspiration from Duke Ellington's description of his own music as "beyond category."

This is a conversation about making a career in music journalism when the music itself refuses to stay in one place.

Let's get started.

LP: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for making time to do this. I think we have a great set of people to talk about some of these definitions, terms, and approaches to music and to a career in journalism. I think we can have both a horizontal and a vertical discussion. Michelle, I wanted to start with you, if I could, because your tagline—or the tagline that I've seen on your website and in reading about you—is "not your parents' jazz."

Michelle Zeto: Yeah.

LP: And I want to start by asking you a bit about your A&R process. How does something get included on your show? What guidelines or definitional rules do you use for you to decide what you're going to play?

Michelle Zeto: Wow. I think what my guidelines are, and they're very loose, and they do adapt and change depending on what comes across my desk or whatever. But really what I particularly like is upbeat, danceable jazz—jazz that makes you want to stop what you're doing and listen and maybe dance. Something that incorporates a variety of influences, like world music. I tend to stay away from vocals, although I do make exceptions. But I like long-form improvisational. The way that it was born was, I'm a hippie and I like hippie music, and I traveled with the Grateful Dead when I was a youngster, probably too young to do that. But what I loved about that was people were uninhibited, really getting into this groove of what the music was doing to them. And I found that as I got into jazz and kind of—I went to college in the San Francisco Bay area, so I was exposed to a lot of different jazz, like Charlie Hunter and people doing things outside the box of regular straight-ahead, your parents' jazz. And so what I found was that those people at my age at that point were really looking for an outlet to let loose and find something that gave them an outlet like dancing. So when I say it's not your parents' jazz, I don't want them to think that what I'm trying to turn them onto is Louis Armstrong or even Miles Davis, for that matter. I want them to look beyond that to jazz that's happening right now. There's a lot of younger artists out there that are doing things that they wouldn't know.

LP: I'm curious for you, Rob. I love the designation of "post-genre." I think it's one of those terms that the listener and the reader can bring their own interpretation to it. But I'm curious what that construct and framework means to you and why it's important.

Rob Shepherd: My undergrad degree was in history, and so I look at the historical stuff of things just by nature. And even if you go back to Miles Davis and Coltrane and all of them, they were avoiding the word "jazz" too. There's some racial connotations to, historical reasons for that too. To me it's, why are we putting all these labels on this music that they themselves were not using? And so that really makes me think, why are we even adhering to these genre concepts at all? I was born in '85, so the whole thing of Stanley Crouch and "is this jazz, is this not jazz?"—granted, that conflict still goes on to some degree, but a lot of the fighting over that was a little bit before my time. But to me, the real question is, is this good music or not? When I was making my website, I decided to come up with a subtitle, like a tag to it. That was "music beyond category." For me, that was more of a reflection of "this is good music to me." I run my own website, so I'm allowed to write about whatever I want to write about or not write about. I just ignore it. I don't have editorial constraints so much because it's me. And so I said, "This is good music," and also "this doesn't fit into this is 'quote-unquote' jazz or this isn't jazz." What I found out about a year ago—so we're talking about five years later—was that's exactly how Duke Ellington described his music: "music beyond category." And so to me, it's fascinating that you go back and this has been going on forever. I think now we're almost seeing it at hyperspeed because a lot of those distinctions between "oh, this is jazz, this is R&B, this is whatever" was tied to the record stores. You can go through streaming sites and things and computers—algorithms will match up what you're supposed to hear based on what you're interested in. So for me, the whole post-genre thing is my heart's in jazz, but why am I limiting it to what some people label as "quote-unquote" jazz? Why am I not taking it broader? And I'm sure some people go to my website and they say, "This is a jazz album. What the hell is this doing on a post-genre website?" I don't really care. To me, it comes down to, is this good music or not? And to me, that thread of jazz improvisation especially is running through all of it.

LP: Yeah. Jeffrey, I want to ask you, given that you have a bit of a longer-term perspective on some of these conversations, do you think about—and how do you have to think about—your voice as a writer when you're approaching different genres? Is there—are there different Jeffreys based on the music you're approaching? And then my second question is, you've seen a lot of change in journalism, clearly, and we all have. But I'm curious as to whether your more encompassing interests and your ability to speak with some authority across genre—you found times in your career where that's helped or hurt because maybe you couldn't be pigeonholed or you couldn't be thought of in a particular way? So I know there's a lot to ask in there, but I'd love to hear your perspectives.

Geoffrey Himes: Before I answer those questions, I want to respond to Rob's points about genre. Categories of genres are essential, and they're essential because they give us a language for talking about music. Because music does cohere around certain histories, certain regions, certain styles of playing. One of the pleasures for me—and I assume for all of you and most of the people listening here—is talking about music as part of the pleasure of the experience. And to say that something is country or to say something is gospel or to say something is blues or say it's Celtic or whatever, that's a shorthand that enables the conversation to flow fluidly. And that doesn't mean that one's better than the other. It doesn't mean that one's locked into a frame. You say, like Michelle was saying, somebody combines jazz and world. Those are two genres, and you know what she's talking about because you know what jazz is and you know what world is. And so you get an idea of what's being combined. In terms of how I write for different situations, it's really—you have to keep in mind what your audience is. So if I'm writing about Jason Moran for JazzTimes, I assume the readership knows who Thelonious Monk is, knows who Charles Lloyd is, and I can just—I can assume things and then go talk on a different level. If I'm writing for the Washington Post, I have to assume that it could be a housewife in Vienna, Virginia, or it could be a jazz nerd from DC. But I have to be able to make sure that what I'm saying is comprehensible to both of them, if that makes sense. And it's a trick. You can use musical terms, but you have to define them in passing as you go, if that makes sense. So you're always, I think, aware of your audience—that affects your voice in that way more than your own personality or whatever. And in terms of whether it's helped my career or hurt my career, it's hard to say. I was going to do it anyway. I'm just—I'm not—harvest my personality. I'm always interested in lots of things rather than one thing. And so I'm always wanting to learn new things and explore new things. I've also written about film and theater and books and art. Just, being a freelancer helps a lot because I can apportion my time that way. One of the advantages of writing for a daily newspaper, especially in the flush days of the seventies and eighties, early nineties, is that if you were a pop music critic, you were encouraged to cover lots of different things—African music, old fiddle music, the whole thing—and it was up to you to know enough about the subject that you could write something useful, at least a thousand words of usefulness on the subject. So it was like going to graduate school in musicology for free. It was like a great education that I got paid for it as it happened, and you got more records if you wrote about different genres.

Michelle Zeto: I agree with both what Rob and what Jeff said, because I feel like there is this weird thing that's happening as we get older that things are starting to blend. So what Jeff said—if there's a record that is jazz and world, if you're looking for that in the record store, where do you go to look for that? And I'm recollecting vinyls, so I'm very familiar with how it can be frustrating to try to find what exactly I'm looking for. So I think there's something to be said with keeping a "quote-unquote" label on something. And I feel like I wouldn't be able to talk to my audience if I couldn't describe what they're about to hear or what they just heard in those terms that they can relate to. But again, I don't think that anybody who talks about music for a living can describe what you're about to hear unless we use those terms. So until there's a better term for jazz and world together—and like, we could make it up—I don't think you're going to be able to really relate what you want to about that music that you're listening to.

Geoffrey Himes: I would just say about the jazz thing is that it's always puzzled me that the term "jazz" and "rock and roll" both referred to a sexual act. Why is that a bad thing to be associated with sex?

Michelle Zeto: It's an interesting argument.

LP: Yeah, I'm with it.

Michelle Zeto: It's definitely an interesting argument.

LP: Rob, you were saying earlier that your life and your emergence as a writer is in a little bit of a post—a lot of the discussions around what is jazz and all those things had already been happening for so long. I'm curious, can you talk to me about credibility and credentialing? If you're arguably not a jazz writer or a rock critic, how do you think about credibility and credentialing, and how does that work when you're dealing with, say, publicists or artists? Do you have to prove yourself? Do you ignore that? How does your self-image and what you're trying to do with your publication interface with the rest of the world?

Rob Shepherd: Sure. So to go back to "you need to use the word 'jazz,'" I do use it sometimes. For me, I'm more interested in connections. So I can say, "Hey, this is coming from John Coltrane," and we can all say Coltrane was a jazz musician, and people can connect to that. But to me it's much more—and it's kind of like how I discovered music: I was looking at "oh, this person played with that person and that person played with that person." And I think a lot of people connect through music that way. So for me, it's more less labels and more of an organic connection, I think, in terms of who people are and what direction they've gone off on. Now again, sometimes I do use that word "jazz," and sometimes I try to avoid it, honestly, but sometimes you have to. As far as credentials and stuff, I have never really had much of an issue with any PR people or artists. I've been doing it for a while, and I think at some point the quality of your work's going to speak for itself. Now, what's interesting to me is I do think it's opened more opportunities for me because there are musicians in general who don't want to use the label "jazz." I think that's maybe made it a little more likely for them to talk to me because they think I'm going to be less likely to try to put my own spin on what they're doing. I do critically evaluate what they're doing. I do think about what they're doing, but I don't try to label it. I don't try to pigeonhole it. Not to say other critics do, but I think the fact that I try to avoid that term sometimes helps me with opportunities. Because there are musicians I've interviewed that I never thought I would talk to, and somehow it's been pretty easygoing for me for the most part.

Geoffrey Himes: There's two different goals here. First, you've got to convince publishers to give you assignments, and that's always tricky. But then there's also—in terms of interviewing, Rob was just saying—I find that if in the first three minutes you can let them know that you know what you're talking about, they'll immediately relax and want to talk to you.

LP: Yeah. You actually—that point you're raising was the next question I wanted to ask you about, Jeffrey, which is especially given the fullness of the career you've had and the different musics you've chosen to explore with your writing, how do you think about the value, if you will, of deep genre expertise? How do you think about being a savant versus a polymath?

Geoffrey Himes: Yeah. Especially early in my career when I had less knowledge than I do now—hopefully I'm glad that there's people who are obsessed with traditional jazz or they're obsessed with the avant-garde of the sixties, because they have a level of knowledge that, you know, it's possible only if you spend your life obsessing over one thing. That's not the kind of way I want to live my life. And so it's good that those people are out there. But what we're writing is 500 words, a thousand words, 2,500 words if you're lucky. It's not hard to teach yourself enough to know what you're talking about for something at that length. And then the advantage for me as the dilettante or polymath, whatever you want to call it, is that I can make references outside of the genre I'm talking about that most writers can't make because I know other genres. For example, I'm about to publish this book on Willie Nelson, and he's not a jazz artist, but there's definitely jazz in his music, and I can talk about that because I know who Bob Wills is and who Emmett Miller is and who—you know, so it makes sense.

LP: Michelle, I'm curious. For the Jazz Journalist Association, the mission of the organization references "all of jazz's genres," and so in one regard, we're all good on this conversation, right? Like we get to define what that means every time we pick up the pen or sit at the keyboard—we're defining all of jazz's genres. Do you see yourself in that lineage? That's the work you're doing—are you defining jazz's genres in the 21st century, or are you just exploring music? Like, how do you think about your mission?

Michelle Zeto: I don't know if I'm defining anything like that. I think the musicians and the bands are defining it. I am a super fan. I just love everything that I play on the show, and that's the energy that I put out there. You know, there's musicians that are touring right now that are doing music that's jazz and punk together, and if you don't like punk, you might not want to even listen to them. But I'll play it in the set that has all kinds of other, lesser hardcore jazz, so that you are exposed to it, that you would fall upon it without knowing it, and it just comes up and you're forced to listen to it and decide without the label if you like it. And I think if there's any mission that I have, it's that music is music, and you can pick and choose, and there's always going to be something that feeds your soul in that way. I don't think I'm defining anything. I think I am platforming, if anything.

LP: Okay, a great use of the term. Rob, could you explore with us for a minute what might get lost when we move beyond the traditional categories? I thought that Jeffrey's point about giving us a language framework—that resonates for me. I'm wondering if you might be open to exploring that line as well.

Rob Shepherd: Sure. The only criticism I might have about applying a specific term is that everybody's going to argue over what that term means. None of these are concrete. I'm a lawyer by training, and so I know—

LP: Ah.

Rob Shepherd: People love yelling and screaming over definitions of terms. There is a concern about if we're just saying, "Hey, this is good music or not," maybe you're overlooking the history of how we got there. You're overlooking the lineage of how things came together. To really understand a lot of the music that makes up "quote-unquote" jazz, you have to understand the history. You have to understand Congo Square. You have to understand 52nd Street. There's all these places that you probably really have to have at least some knowledge of to fully understand the music. And I can understand the concerns about that being lost by stepping away from the term. And you can make all sorts of arguments along those lines. For me personally, though, it goes back to the musicians. If they're not—if many of them throughout the history aren't using that label, who are we to do that? And again, I understand the uniting factor. I'm going to get along better with "quote-unquote" jazz people than I would, I don't know, heavy metal. But for me, it's much more interesting to see it in a less structured way. And you can do that in a way where you're still recognizing the history, you're still recognizing how we got there, you're still recognizing the threads that run through the music. But to me, we just don't need the strict labels as much.

Geoffrey Himes: I'd respond to that. We as writers have a different role in all this than the musicians do. Part of what we're trying to do is translate the musical experience into words. And that's why we use these words we've been talking about. And a lot of musicians feel, "Oh man, I may play screeching baritone saxophone, but if I wasn't called a genre, I would sell as many records as Taylor Swift." No, you're not going to sell as many records as Taylor Swift, so I don't care what you call it. That's okay. The musicians—that's not their job to translate what they're doing into words. That's our job. And so we have a different role than they do. They're making the music; we're trying to create a language. Hopefully—what's our role? It seems like critics have two roles. One is to be a consumer advisor, but that's, to me, the lesser part of our job. The important part of the job is to translate music into words in a way that the listener, the reader, will have a greater, a better experience because of something we've written and that we're adding light to what's going on.

Rob Shepherd: I can understand that, but to me, if I'm not at that basic level where they're saying, "Hey, this song is about"—let's look at visual art. "This painting is of a river." If I'm going off on writing about how it's about fireworks or something completely irrelevant, I'm not fully going to understand or appreciate whether it's a good painting of a river or not. To me, to be a critic, you really kind of have to come to a certain baseline point of "okay, this is where they're coming from. Does it actually work from what they're saying it is?" And so for me, for them to go out and say, "Yeah, we're not using any of these labels. Here's what I think my music is"—okay, I'm going to start with that as a beginning point and say, "Does it actually satisfy what they say it is?" If I can't get to that first step of "here's where they're starting from, does it actually do it?" I cannot be able to get fully, at least from my personal purposes, to the point of "is it actually any good?"

Geoffrey Himes: I would agree with that. And I would say that you always have to figure out what they're trying to do, and then you have to figure out, are they actually doing what they're trying to do, and is it worth doing? To do that, we have to have language in a way that they don't have to have.

Rob Shepherd: But I still think we can use language without needing specific labels. I know that in general we're writing—we're not just writing "this is jazz." We're explaining. And again, I don't overtly avoid the term "jazz," but at the same time, I don't feel like that term by itself 100 percent adds anything. Sometimes, yeah, it's shorthand. I can't really get to what I'm trying to get to otherwise. But by itself, I don't usually see it as a necessary term.

Geoffrey Himes: To me, those terms have usefulness in just what you said, that there's certain times you can say something with a word rather than taking a paragraph to explain what you mean.

Rob Shepherd: Since I'm mostly writing for myself, I don't care so much about space.

Geoffrey Himes: Right.

Rob Shepherd: I have pitched to other places and things and have worried about space before, but generally speaking, since I mostly write for myself, if I want to go long, I go long. People don't like it, they can skip over it.

Geoffrey Himes: The great irony of everything going online is that publishers want you to write shorter pieces.

Rob Shepherd: Yeah.

Geoffrey Himes: People's attention spans have shrunken so much.

Rob Shepherd: Yeah.

Michelle Zeto: I think that says it right there. It's this social media culture that—character limit and immediate gratification. I need to know exactly what your point is in two sentences or I'm moving on. And it's hard to grab people's attention in that way. I see it every day with the musicians that I work with. There's one musician that I was just talking to today—he released a new album. I didn't even know. Then he posted another follow-up post that said, "I'm quitting the industry because nobody knows I released an album last week and I got no engagement." But that post—him complaining about that—got 200,000 in engagement. And it was like, I need to have drama and it needs to be succinct, and then I'll get engagement. But the most important thing is I released this album and nobody knows. And like, how do you deal with that? It's difficult. It's a difficult thing to keep people's attention and to try to give them what they're looking for in very short, succinct terms that they understand.

Geoffrey Himes: I think it's not an entirely new thing. I think there's always been short attention spans, and there's always been a minority of people who really want in-depth writing about the culture. That's been true. And it's still true today. And if you're going to write about culture in depth, you have to come to terms with that and accept that you're writing for a sizeable but specific audience.

LP: Yeah. The example I was thinking of—before Michelle responded there—the example I was thinking of was like the New Yorker profile, right? The New Yorker profile has been this monument in 20th-century and now 21st-century journalism for a hundred years. And it stands and finds an audience whether or not there's long or short attention spans. So I think a lot about conventions. Sitcoms have a convention and rules they play by; hour-long dramas have theirs. And even though we've had the Internet now for 30 years or so, I'm not sure the conventions have all been ironed out yet. I'm not sure we know what reading long-form is like yet on screens. The screens are still evolving. I'm just not sure the medium and the conventions around it have settled into a stable form yet. They did it much quicker with things like television and radio. I wonder if anybody wants to take that point on.

Rob Shepherd: I will say, because I do mostly long-form interviews, that I do worry about people's attention spans. So what I try to do, at least from my website, is I try to put in as many videos or clips of audio as I can, thinking, "Okay, maybe they're not paying attention. They'll click this, they'll watch this, and they can move on from there." Instead of just a long block of text, I try to split it up so that there's interactive features. Because I think everybody's attention span is limited.

LP: Yeah. Michelle, how do you think about the context that you want to give your listeners? Do you want to just present the music, or do you want to tell story around it? And how much story? How much story feels right to you to tell?

Michelle Zeto: The way my show is formatted is it's mostly music. I do an intro and an outro for four sets of music. It's a two-hour program, and I talk eight times, and I really try to limit what I say and I let the music speak for itself. And I encourage my listeners to do deep dives and rabbit holes, and I talk about liner notes. If there's something intriguing to talk about per an artist, I will definitely tell a story. But for the most part, I really just want them to be exposed to a lot of different music in two hours. And that is something that—like, if you look at my set list, they're very eclectic. And I used to joke with Russ Davis that I have eclectic weirdness because no set is the same and they don't really follow a theme. It's just where my attention goes. So it's like they're getting this weird look into my brain whether they like it or not. And I think that resonates with a lot of people. I think the majority of the feedback that I get from listenership is I've exposed them to things they wouldn't have been exposed to before, which is exactly the mission. So that makes me happy when I hear that I'm being successful at exposing musicians that they wouldn't have found on their own.

LP: Jeffrey, I'm curious how that lands for you, given the comments you made a little earlier about the role or roles of the critic. Something that I see is very similar between the three of you is that you're all driven by your tastes and your interests, and those are guiding a lot of the choices you make, either in an individual piece or across a career arc. I'm wondering, in addition to explaining and contextualizing an artist, is your role as a critic just to be a platform, just to connect artists with audience? Do you get off on that?

Geoffrey Himes: I think earlier in my career I was more interested in discovering the next new thing or whatever. And now I'm more interested in going in depth about things I care about deeply and trying to say something new about what they're doing. You know what I'm encountering—I just started a podcast, which is called "Hard Rain and Pink Cadillacs," and it's mostly non-jazz music. But those are like hour-long interviews with people to get beyond the autopilot answers that a lot of artists give you when they first start to interview and trying to push them out of that to really talk about how the music is made and why it's made the way it is. And I think both of those are valid things, and I think that introducing people to new artists, especially who are valuable, have something to say but aren't getting noticed—that's a great service to provide to people. For me, it's more about pointing people to artists who have been around for a while but have never gotten their due. So I think, yeah, those are all valuable things.

LP: Rob, my last question for you is, how do you appreciate the difference between the role of the journalist and the critic versus the role of the interviewer and letting the artist—to use Michelle's word again—to platform the artist firsthand, to be a conduit for the artist to speak for themselves? How do you think about that?

Rob Shepherd: Most of my criticism or individual thoughts are going to be in the introductory paragraphs of the pieces I write. Now when I'm shaping my questions, I'll put them in there too. As far as where the conversation goes, I give the artist a lot of leeway in where to go, obviously. To me, because I am mostly just working with musicians or music that I like, it is a platform for them. But I do a lot of research and put a lot of thought into the questions I ask. And even if a conversation flows a certain way, I have a very good way of directing it to where I wanted to go. And so I gently editorialize through that way. So instead of them going off onto track A, I'm making sure we go back onto track B where I want to go. Now, obviously I have no control over what they say, and I'm not going to manipulate what they say or anything like that. But for me, just in terms of the questions and the flow of the conversation and the amount of control I have over that, plus the introductory paragraphs I have for these interviews, I do put a lot of editorial things in there.

LP: Great.

Geoffrey Himes: I think that being a critic is a kind of art form, and that we are not just documenters or publicists. We're artists ourselves who have a voice and a style of our own, the same way that a musician should have a voice and style of their own. And it's hard to get there and you have good days and bad days, but that's the goal at least.

LP: Yeah. Appreciate. Michelle, I want to end with you, and I want to ask a question that I think might be ideally suited for you, which is, in the period of time that you've had your various broadcast programs, they parallel the rise of streaming algorithms, playlist culture—certainly over the last 10 or 15 years of that. That to me says that there's a lot of genre blending going on. I'm wondering how you've watched the rise of playlist culture and streaming algorithms, how they've contributed to a post-genre consumption world.

Michelle Zeto: I have to say, when I look at the demographics of who listens to my show, it's primarily men between the age of 40 and 70. But when I do get younger listeners interacting with me, I do a little dance because I'm so excited that it has reached someone that is not in that group and that demographic. And what I find is that the younger listeners—I think they have been brought up in that culture where they were using Spotify. And then there was another one before that—I can't remember. Pandora. They would tell me that their algorithm wasn't feeding them what they wanted. And I feel like that was a frustration that was going on. They didn't have someone—a DJ or someone telling them that "you don't listen to that, you're more interested in this." There's this love-hate relationship with that kind of service, that kind of algorithm. And I think it's the same way that they feel frustrated with their social media feeds and that kind of thing too, where they're getting things that they didn't really seek out or want. But I do have a specific taste in music, even though it's broad. And I think listeners—my listeners, particularly, I mean I can't speak to anybody else, because that's all I've got—but my listeners tend to really value what I bring to the table. And I think that's different than just some computer telling them that "this is structured similarly to this, so I think you're going to like this," because sometimes that doesn't work. But again, my show is very eclectic, and there is definitely stuff that people probably don't like that they would wish they could skip over. And they can do that in the archive, but live, they have to sit through it and figure out if they like it and what they like about it and what they don't like about it. And I think that there's something to be said about that. That's one of the things that really is sad about the way that XM Radio was absorbed into Sirius, is that they became much more computerized, and they'll have one person programming multiple channels instead of having each individual taste in all of the different "quote-unquote" genres and channels. And it's a sad thing because I think people miss that, and that's also feedback that I get. People that used to listen to me on XM complain that Sirius is just not what they thought. It's not the same. I think it's inauthentic. I think that's what writers do. You're talking about something that's passionate, and I think that comes through. And like I said, if it's a song or a tune that is jazz and punk and you don't like punk, you've got it in your head you don't like punk, but you hear me say how great it is and how much I really dig it and I really think you would too, and it's because of this, I think that opens your mind a little bit more.

LP: Yeah. By way of thanking the three of you for your time, it's a valuable service, getting more important as we get more algorithmically driven. So thank the three of you for your time and for your work. I feel very lucky to have spent time with you, so thank you.

Michelle Zeto: Thank you.

LP: All right. Thank you so much, and have a wonderful weekend, each of you.

Rob Shepherd: You too.

Michelle Zeto: Nice to meet you all.

LP: Take care.

Rob Shepherd: Nice to meet you too.