Today we’re diving deep into the art of connection versus mere performance. We’re joined by the life-long record promoter, Ray Ramsay, who’s been around the block more times than a song on the radio! If you’ve ever tapped your feet to Whitney Houston or jammed with the Backstreet Boys, you’ve felt the magic Ray helped create. We’ll explore how relationships and instinct used to reign supreme in the music biz, but now it feels like we’re all just pawns in the algorithm game. This episode is a rollercoaster of stories, insights, and humor—just the way we like it.

Takeaways:

• In the music biz, it’s all about emotion and making genuine connections, not just algorithms.
• Humor can light up the darkest days; a good laugh is like sunshine for the soul!
• Building relationships is key; people remember how you made them feel, not just what you said.
• Navigating the music landscape today means embracing creativity while avoiding the pitfalls of data-driven decisions.
• The future of creativity lies in teaching the next generation to connect with their humanity, not just through screens.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Ignite Voice Inc.
• Bruce Allen
• David Foster
• Dolly Parton
• Whitney Houston
• Backstreet Boys
• NSync
• Dido
• Ken Bain
• Echo Advertising
• Z-95
• Gino Vanelli
• Ross Vanelli

Your voice is your superpower. Use it. Welcome to Ignite My Voice Becoming unstoppable. Powered by Ignite Voice Inc. The podcast where voice meets purpose and stories ignite change.

Deep conversations with amazing guests, storytellers, speakers and change makers.

If you make people laugh, they probably won't forget you. Especially in the business we've been in where everybody's under a ton of strain and pressure and that little laugh is a bright spot.

Hi, I'm Kat. When you walk into a room, are you performing or are you connecting?

Because in the music industry, the people who last aren't just talented, they know how to make you feel something. Hi, I'm Kev.

Today we're talking to Ray Ramsay, a record promoter who helped shape careers and trusted his gut before the data and.

Built success on relationships, instinct, and a refusal to play the game the wrong way.

From Bruce Allen to David Foster, Dolly Parton to Whitney Houston to the Backstreet.

Boys and NSync, this is a behind the scenes look at what really makes a hit and what's been lost along the way.

If it's music business or your voice,.

Connection isn't strategy, it's human. Here's Ray Ramsay.

You really had a lot of power in your role because you could go around to the radio stations and support them in making the right decision to make or break an artist. Like, that's. That's huge. That's a lot of power.

There was another girl, Dido, from England, of course.

Yeah, we know Dido, of course.

Yeah, you do. Huge priority again. I think it was Clive. We had to break it in Canada. Foreign artist, no health in the States yet. I'm sitting there watching tv.

One of my wife's shows, I think it was Roswell, it was for kids. And I thought, oh, I'll watch this, maybe I'll get lucky later. Because I did. And at the end of the show, this song comes on.

I'm going, wait a minute, that's Dido. What the hell? This show is huge. With the zed, it was ZED95. It was their demographic.

Wow.

And I was so mad, I got on the phone crack of dawn the next morning to my boss in Toronto, Ken Bain, and I said, what the fuck are you guys doing? This girl's on that TV show and you didn't say anything. This is what you're going to do.

When you hang up, you're going to go down to Echo Advertising and you're going to get the demo for me for that show and back to me at the speed of fucking light. Bye.

You don't miss words.

Well, I was pushed into a corner, I felt. So I took it to. I got the info and it was Curtis who was there at that point. And I took it in and I said he was a great guy to deal with too.

Is that Curtis Pope?

No, Strange. Curtis Madams or Curtis Strange?

There's so many different Curtis's.

Yeah. So I said, curtis, look at this. That's that show. That's your station's demo. And she does the theme song. Oh.

So he tested it a couple of times and he got response. Next thing you know, it's added and I was over the top. I phoned up Toronto and I got the product manager and I said, got some news for you, man.

I broke the record on ZED, first top 40 station in Canada. And he said, it's about fucking time. And I said, what? And he says, about fucking time.

And I said, listen, asshole, what did you do to promote this record? I did something nobody else even thought of doing. And that's what you talked to me like, fuck you. And I resigned.

Wow, you resigned from the label at that time?

Wow.

Over diet?

I didn't realize that.

Well, yeah, she kind of owes you. Dieta was it. But it was the thinking and everything behind it that pushed me. And by the way, don't talk to me like that.

Especially on the other end of a phone, 2,000 miles away. Maybe I'm too proud of my work, but still, it was in greatness, beyond contempt. I said, that's it, I'm taking early retirement.

So they said, okay, okay, okay, we need you to stay on another year to do whatever. Just like I watch the kids and stuff like that. But that's what sparked it because I thought, this is impossible. When I go to work, I go to war.

When I'm promoting a record I believe in, I go to the mat.

And you use your creativity. Holy smokes. Like you came at it from a very different way, that another person might not be able to manage that. That's amazing.

Yeah, I think that's my mother's fault. Because it was something like I needed people to quit leaving me.

There's deep seated stuff there, Ray. You know, you're sounding a lot like Bruce Allen. They're sounding a lot. There's some rage there. There's a whole bunch of things well earned.

And you and Bruce go way back.

Yeah, we do. Yeah. We always got along. We had a burp or two, one which I got Powder Blues signed to RCA and I was quite proud of.

That you should be.

And Bruce became the manager. And after that, he called me up in full stentorian roar.

Well, this store doesn't have this record or their record, and they only got that many in that store. And he's yelling at me over the phone.

He was good at that. Yeah.

Very intimidating.

I just yelled back. I thought, you know what? You're not going to talk to me like that.

Because for one thing, you are right about the inventory, but you're wrong about who's putting the records in the store. This branch doesn't handle those stores.

You got to talk to the salespeople in Toronto and do that, Bruce, then that's fine, but stop yelling at me, because I'm the guy who signed the goddamn ban.

Yeah.

So we're still. We're good.

I have a story about him.

Do you?

It involves my dad. So my dad's a musician. He was with a band called the Canadian Strangers.

Well, they're called the Canadian Strangers now, but they were called the Strangers. They went to Europe. And one person in the band, his name was David Foster.

The David Foster?

The David Foster. And he was 16 years old when he went out of Victoria, and his mom asked my dad to make sure David Foster, you know, followed the rules.

So my dad took David under his wing and they became lifelong friends.

Moble's a good success story. I mean, for Bruce, who had the hard rock and roll people, by varying degrees, under his wing, I mean, Bryan Adams was one of the peaks.

Michael was a cocktail singer in a bar. But you gotta start somewhere. I admire the work that's been done. He got through to all those people like, I'm singing.

I equated the album, his new country album, to be like a peanut butter sandwich, except not the crunchy stuff, but the stuff that's spreadable, as in between all the formats. And I tried. I thought, well, if I use some humor, that'll work. And humor almost always works.

If you make people laugh, they probably won't forget you. Especially in the business we've been in where everybody's under a ton of strain and pressure. And that little laugh in the day is a bright spot.

You've always been good at that. That's what I remember you for.

Aw, me?

Yeah. You would come in full of energy, and you really felt passionate about what you were presenting to everybody at the station.

You really believed in what you were giving for the artist. That was amazing.

Well, thank you. Thank you. That was just the way I am.

How did you get that way?

Well, it's about connections to people. I mean, that's what we talk a lot about in the podcast, is building connections. And you were good at that.

I said, I can't send this out, this is bullshit. So I'm going to write my own my way and send it out.

And at that time, a lot of younger people were coming up over the older ones because the guy that wrote that, I could see in my mind's eye a fedora hat of an old wrinkled guy putting whiskey on his cornflakes. So I thought, that's not right, I'm not doing that. I do it my way. So I wrote that. And I don't know if it moved anything, but it did move the people.

The younger people, because of the humor in it, they got a laugh and they could show their more grief for the rest of their day or whatever. That's the way I always try and approach things if I can.

But it's integrity too, right? You're coming at it from your.

Need.

To be a professional and to relate and to connect in a different way.

I can be a nice guy or I can be a real son of a bitch. And when I need to be a son of a bitch, I can be it. And I've done it.

I had one artist at the Commodore, I can't remember his name now, he's a rockabilly guy, It'll come to me. And he was doing fairly well in the market. Not Vancouver, he was from la and at the end of the show, we'd already.

The salespeople had set up an autograph signing thing at Glenn's records, which were Kitty Corner, right? So him and his manager come up to me and they're going, I can't go to that store thing, I need some blow.

What? Okay. That was the way it was.

And I said, okay, well, you need to understand something first. Number one, I do promotion, I'm not a pimp and I don't push drugs.

And if you don't get your ass over there in the next 10 minutes, you're not going to sell another fucking record in this town again. So you decide. They went over, but I thought, where do you get the idea I can get you drugs? I mean, if I'm involved With drugs.

They're not while I'm working, that's for goddamn sure. When I worked, I never drank or had a little toot. No, never did it. Because I needed to be on my.

On your game.

Yes. You have to do that.

Yeah, you would think.

And especially if you do that around the artist, then they think, oh, he's a mark. No, I'm not. Well, if I'm a mark, it's one on your eye. I was gonna drink that.

But you needed to stand up in that particular case. That's the right thing to do. So you're doing the right thing again. Integrity.

They think that the record people are all, you know, just tell them they'll do whatever. When I was dealing with this one Canadian artist, curly hair, Gino Vanelli's brother, Ross Vanelli.

Does anybody remember Ross Vanelli?

Here's why.

Yeah, I knew we were going to get there.

He had a record out and that was fine. I'm good with that. And him and his manager from LA were having lunch and things were going swimmingly.

Then he says, so, Ray, he says, how much going to cost us to get this on radio? And I thought, careful. I said, what are you talking about? And he said, well, you know, paying this and that.

And I said, I want you to understand something. I don't do that. I'm in Canada and I don't. Well, I do know what you guys do down there, but it's rarely done up here and I don't do it at all.

So I don't want to hear those words come out of your mouth again. Ever. Don't say it. I was just furious. I wanted to beat him to death in front of witnesses because I thought, how dare you?

You don't think that I can get my job done without bribing somebody? That's an insult.

And it's completely different philosophy.

Yeah, and you hurt my feelings.

I mean, that whole marketing system, the whole idea that young people paid attention to radio and radio would break records. I mean, that's all gone. Young people have no idea what a radio is anymore.

Or a record.

Or a record. Yeah. Buy CDs. Boy, what does an artist do now, huh?

Well, now you just have to get out there in person and do your stuff live and make your own recordings and try and move those around as best you can using the Internet.

Isn't that how Justin Bieber broke, using the Internet?

It probably did. I had the Backstreet Boys, although they were just a little bit ahead of that impact kind of thing. Those guys Couldn't find their own way home.

In fact, I think they lived on a traffic circle on the same street. It's my house.

But they sure were cute. The girls sure liked them.

Oh, yeah, I saw them once. They were my fault here, by the way. At one show, in the middle of the show, they're putting on guitars and stuff, and I'm going to.

Okay, what's this, then? Because that was when they said, well, they're not a real band. They don't play instruments.

So they were showing the audience how they played instruments, ignoring the fact that they had a full professional band that were still playing right behind them. So if that band stopped, they were hooped. But, you know, it just went on and on like that. You know, I had a lot. Well, not a lot, fortunately.

I had NSync. It was all like, okay, this is what you do. You stand like this, look like that, speak like this, and I'll look after the rest.

So, I mean, it wasn't a group that came up from groups from what we knew.

It was producer bands.

Yeah. And what does that say about talent? What is talent? What does it take to have talent? You have an ear.

So how did you recognize talent when you listened? What did you. Something jumped out at you?

It just hit me. I remember hearing Whitney's I will always love you. And three seconds into the song, I said, that's a hit. There is no dispute.

And I don't think I ever. I knew at that point that Dolly Parton had written it.

And the muck and mire behind that was the people in the business, Elvis's manager included, was trying to get her to sell the song.

She stood her ground.

Yes. And she wouldn't do it. And good for you, Dolly. Dolly is also one of the most wonderful people I ever met with or worked with in the music business.

She's just like, man, I wish there was more people like that. You can do little rinky dink stuff. Send it to TikTok. It's got no substance to it.

Like, I taught my son how to play the guitar, and he became a pretty good guitar player, and he could make music, and he do fiddle with a piano and stuff as well. He was inclined that way. Is that what's happening with kids now? Do they even have a guitar?

Well, they've reduced so many programs. The creative programs. Band's been dropped or at least, you know, sidelined. Creativity doesn't hold value.

Yeah, well, but I look at the overall system and I think about that. I go TikTok or Social media we're talking about, really, those tools are created to generate data. Right.

We get lost and we start thinking that the TikTok is important or the video is important. No, no, no, no. There's a large tech company involved here that wants to generate as much data as possible.

The real money is in selling the data that they generate about the users. Right. That's the purpose of social media. It's not distributing content or creativity.

And so the overall system gets built on using creativity, sort of, or using the content in order to generate data, in order to make money up here. And you spill a little bit of the money back to a few of the big creative generators. Right. The big numbers.

And so you make it look like there's some artists making money, but that's not what's going on when you see the overall system. And this podcast has dealt with those systems for a while.

We're kind of saying there's a house of cards here, people, that's built up where we think this is what's going on. But through that process, we lose creativity, we lose humanity, we lose artists. There's no longer a place for it. We don't teach our kids the art.

Nope.

Wow. You start looking ahead at the next. The AI world, and you start thinking, I don't want that world for my kids. And so what do we do about it?

What do you and I do? You know, you're a creative guy doing stuff. You came from a creative industry. How do we help the next generation recover some of this?

That's a big question.

We can talk about this in so many different ways, and we will in the future. But I'm thinking about why do I listen to music?

I want to hear somebody going through what I'm going through, or I want to hear real, raw emotion, or I want to hear stories from real people. I don't know that AI can generate that. Exactly. I don't.

I agree with that 100%. How could you write I will always love you if you don't have emotion?

I mean, you can write fun stuff that's like a parody like you're talking about, that's fun to listen to once. But I don't know if that's why I listen to music, really.

And maybe we all need to think about that a little bit, think about our choices, because that's what power you and I have as just people.

Yeah.

What do you choose? Makes a big difference.

It's hard to put the phone down when so many people are living in that world. And you Think you have fomo? Fear of missing out. What am I missing if I'm not posting, if I'm not participating?

But if every single one of us stops, then it goes away. Here's how you use it, but here's how you can critically manage it.

So it's a tool.

And if we teach people it's a tool that can be used for the better or not, we can maybe start to put it in its place and recognize we have a choice of what we do with the tool and where we put our attention. And that attention, it's humanity's future and it's money. And maybe we have a responsibility for where we place our attention.

And attention is in our bodies. It's around us. It's what we feel, it's what we smell, it's what we breathe. That's the attention.

And we're losing that connection to ourselves and each other because we're looking at our phone every day.

In the end, it's our potential death.

Yeah.

That's how critical managing our attention is.

Be here now, be present.

Maybe that needs to be articulated better everywhere. And we need to tell it to our friends, because that's how we'll reclaim humanity, isn't it?

You know, what stood out to me was this idea that the industry didn't just change, it disconnected.

Yeah, it moved from relationships to transactions, from instinct to algorithms.

But Ray reminds us, people don't remember the strategy.

They remember how you make them feel. The laugh, the moment, the connection.

And if you're promoting a record, leading a team, or stepping into your own.

Voice, integrity, courage and authenticity still cut through the noise.

AI can replicate sound, but it can't replicate. And that's what people are really listening for. Right.

Book a coaching session with one of our talent developmenters.

Ignitemyvoice.com.

Ignite my voice. Becoming unstoppable. Your voice is your superpower. Use it.