Transcript: Episode 233: Musical Tasting Menu
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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor with Susan Barry, episode 233. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/233.
[00:00:14] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.
[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Kurt Oleson is the Chief Operating Officer and co-owner of Custom Channels, a Denver-based company that provides fully licensed human-curated music solutions for hotels, restaurants, and other businesses. A classically trained pianist who studied computer science, psychology, and music engineering at Tufts University. Kurt began his career at Echo Nests, the music data company whose technology now powers Spotify's recommendation engine. He later joined Custom Channels as a music engineer, building the technology behind Enterprise Playlist Management. Over the course of a decade, Kurt evolved into the company's operational leader before acquiring it with a business partner last year. Today we are going to talk about the role of audio in hospitality, but before we jump in, we need to answer the call button.
Call button rings…
The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals who have burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at (850) 404-9630. The emergency call button is brought to you by Cayuga Hospitality Consultants. Cayuga is a highly concentrated organization of the industry's best-connected consultants across multiple disciplines. Members are former senior executives who now work independently on projects worldwide. Learn more at cayugahospitality.com. That is c-a-y-u-g-a hospitality.com.
Okay, Kurt, today's question was submitted by Brady and Brady asks, what happens if I just play music in my restaurant rather than using a service or getting a license? Is it really that big of a deal? Am I gonna go to jail? Kurt, what do you have to say to Brady?
[00:02:45] Kurt Oleson: Well, Brady, we do get that question a lot, and I'm sure you're not the only one who's had that thought or even guilty of doing just that. At the end of the day, though, it is not legal to play music through Spotify, a personal account. Oftentimes, even if you own the content on CDs, unless you are paying some supplemental licensing and these agencies called Performing Rights Organizations, you may have heard of ASCAP or BMI are the two major players there. They will send out letters and fines every year to non-compliant restaurant owners, non-compliant operators. Nobody likes when the artists don't get compensated for their art. So using a service like ours or paying those licenses yourself, just make sure that artists are supported and that you stay above forward.
[00:03:47] Susan Barry: Do you think that the cost, I'm sure you've done this math before, but I can just hear somebody sitting back, like, I'll just pay the fine if they ever catch me. But it's probably pretty significant to make it worth paying for the licensure, right?
[00:04:03] Kurt Oleson: Absolutely. I mean, the fines, the way that copyright law works, fines are actually assessed on a per-performance. So if one of these agencies comes to you and sends you a cease and desist, or a fine if you don't pay a fee. They may then choose to audit your business, and if they can prove that a certain number of songs in their catalog were played without the proper licensing, you would get a fine of up to $10,000 per song.
[00:04:33] Susan Barry: Holy mackerel. So if you have like one CD that you're playing over and over and over again, that could rack up a pretty hefty bill.
[00:04:41] Kurt Oleson: Yeah, exactly. Now that it's most typical in venues that play live music and things like that, but even just background audio, the same copyright laws apply. You do not wanna fall afoul of copyright licensing.
[00:04:55] Susan Barry: So, interesting. Well, let's go back a little bit. We talked about all of the different things that you studied when you were in school. Did you have a plan when you were doing the combination of computer science, psychology, and music engineering? Like, did you know what you were building toward, or does it only make sense sort of in hindsight?
[00:05:18] Kurt Oleson: Well, the short answer is no. I didn't know what I was building towards. And I didn't even know what I was necessarily going to study as my primary major or anything, even when I went to college, other than I was a musician, a performer, and I enjoyed science, research, and technology. I actually recently was invited to do like a TED Talk-style speech at my old high school. And my topic of that talk was about following passion adjacent opportunities, right? Everybody, when they grow up, you always hear like, follow your passions, follow your passions, do what you love. And I did that for a while and I realized that I might not make a career out of being a pianist or those types of things, but I could still find something adjacent to what I loved and the music. And I was really pulling at any thread that was broadly associated with music technology. When I started looking at career opportunities, I found a music engineering program in college. I started building musical instruments. I started programming musical software. I still played piano. I still performed. I was even hired by my old high school to go back and be a music director at one point. And I didn't lose sight of that, but I also let these passion-adjacent opportunities sort of drag me along. I guess drag's probably not the right word there.
[00:06:48] Susan Barry: Well, it seems like you had perfect timing for the technology piece of the puzzle. I know you helped train sort of the early music recommendation algorithms. And you did that before people even knew of Spotify. I'm curious about what it's like to work on technology that truly then went on to change the way the world listens to music. Like, I can think back on my hotel career and be like, okay, I remember when the Westin Heavenly bed rolled out. That was a big industry changer for the hotel business. But it didn't change the day-to-day lives of like literally every consumer under the sun. Was it positive, do you think? Negative, neutral? Looking back, what do you think?
[00:07:43] Kurt Oleson: I would say mostly net positive, right? As a music technology student working at a music data company, the idea that I was helping to sort of socialize the concepts that typically only music students care about when listening to their favorite songs, like tonality, modality, valence energy. These things that are now unlocking the ability to create playlists from these generative algorithms. I think that's a really cool part of what I was doing and where the industry has gone. I think simultaneously, though, the privatization of a lot of that data, much like many software industries, makes it a little bit of a black box of unknowing. I was doing this 12-13 years ago, training this data. But now, what does that data, where does that data live? What does it feed are, is there something happening behind the scenes that is surfacing music to the top that we don't know about? The idea of open source in software of everybody able to see the source code, how it's built, and shared around. In a way, I think the perfect evolution of that training, those algorithms would be if music data became very open source to all, so we could all sort of see how our recommendations were being surfaced.
[00:09:11] Susan Barry: Do you think if all of that information were available, this is probably a really super question, 'cause I think the answer is automatically yes. So maybe I should change it and say how would this happen? But how do you think that it would impact the types of music that got made going forward? Like, if everyone could look and go, oh, this happens, then this happens all of a sudden, do we lose whole swaths of genre that people love?
[00:09:42] Kurt Oleson: I think that's a really good point. But yeah, at the end of the day. Everybody's still going to have their own personal beliefs and feelings about what they like and what they listen to. And if you've paid attention to some of these year-end wrap-ups from music companies and there are all these micro genres that are appearing. This is one of the benefits of having this music data, regardless of where it comes from. But the idea that someone can carve out and be like, I am the most popular retro jazz bulk musician. Carving out these niches is really critical. And opening up this recommendation data and algorithmic data to see how our tastes are being served. I don't think it necessarily takes that away. I think it puts it in the hands of the user so that they can drive and find what they're interested in more on their own terms.
[00:10:49] Susan Barry: Interesting. I know from our first conversation and already from this one that you and I could probably talk about the theoretical piece of this conversation from now until the end of time. So I have to force myself to shift gears and ask about something a little bit more practical, which is, I know that in the last year, you and your business partner bought custom channels. And I'm curious if your approach to the business, or even like how you feel on a day-to-day basis, changed when you went from employee to owner?
[00:11:27] Kurt Oleson: The biggest difference I'd say was sort of my visibility and accessibility to our customers, clients, vendors, things like that, and traveling. Our company has always been founded on the idea of being a good partner, and the founders were really good at developing relationships and really keeping those close. And when I took over with my partner, we went out there and gave FaceTime to our partners and our vendors. People like getting attention from decision makers at the companies that they work with or the people that they partner with, because it shows that they care. Their success is directly to tied to your success. And no company, customer, or vendor is really too small for us to get out there and meet. Because as an ownership position, we wanted to understand our place in the market and who we work with and who we partner with. So that definitely was the biggest change, was getting out there, traveling and meeting, and being accessible to people.
[00:12:35] Susan Barry: You don't have to answer this if you don't want to, but do you worry more or less about the business than you did before?
[00:12:42] Kurt Oleson: Oh. That's a good question. I would say that worry might be the wrong word for it. I certainly think about the business more than I did before. Whereas I still am focused on the operations, the sort of technology backbone. Just being able to make sure that we are keeping things updated and delivering content and services to our partners. Whereas now, I think a lot more about the future. And we wanna be forward-looking and cutting edge and bringing new things to our partners. And I was certainly more along for the ride previously than I am now about, okay, we can shape that future however we want.
[00:13:35] Susan Barry: I think you answered this in part when we were talking about Brady's question, but I do think we need to level set a little bit about just what does all of this licensing means. I learned a little bit about this. I used to work for the independent funeral directors of Florida, so this professional association of funeral directors, and they offered music licensure as like one of the services for the members. So the fact that I learned about this from funeral directors, I think underscores how complicated and confusing the sort of music licensure piece can be. At a high level, our audience of hoteliers and restaurant owners, and sort of hospitality folks, what are they paying for when they license music and what do they need to be thinking about?
[00:14:27] Kurt Oleson: There are many different rights that go along with music, but in short, the two most basic levels of copyright protection for playing music in a business are the performance and composition of a song. So, in other words, the artists, the performer, and the song who writes the composition for the music. When you're playing background music, you need to make sure that you're covering both performance and composition licensing. And the reason it's so important is because when you play a song in your place of business. That's a performance license because you're no longer just playing it in your earbuds for yourself, an audience of one. You're playing it for an audience of over the course of a day, week, month, thousands, right? Tens of thousands, right? And these performance licenses directly benefit the composition owners, the songwriters, right? The people who often maybe don't get the credit. But they need to be fairly compensated for their work.
[00:15:30] Susan Barry: Or they're never gonna write another song and then what will we do?
[00:15:34] Kurt Oleson: The composition for the songwriters that is managed by performing rights organizations or pros, right? That's the ASCAP, the PMI, CSEC, all these companies, those rights holders belong to these member organizations and those royalty distributions get paid out from there. So services like ours, we pay into performing rights organizations and they distribute to their members. And a single song of one album that another song at that same album could be registered with a different performing rights organization.
[00:16:07] Susan Barry: Wait, what?
[00:16:09] Kurt Oleson: Yes. And this is the part that people don't always recognize is that like Bruno Mars or Beyonce or Jack Bryant, they are not necessarily registered to any one organization, the people or they themselves who write those songs may choose to register those compositions with any number of organizations.
[00:16:32] Susan Barry: Oh, wow. So you could have songs 1, 2, 3, and 4 written by four different songwriters and therefore, oh, I would never have thought of that. It sounds like, I mean, not to make this a commercial for you, I am sure you wouldn't mind, but am I accurate in saying that kind of the point of a business like yours is that so that the end user doesn't have to think about all this crazy stuff?
[00:16:56] Kurt Oleson: Right, right. It’s about complication, simplifying things as well as everybody's heard of collective bargaining, right? Because we license so many businesses under our license with the pros we have. Incredibly well negotiated licensing rates that means paying a service like ours is a fraction of the cost of paying every PRO.
[00:17:22] Susan Barry: I see. That makes a lot of sense. You also, besides just kind of keeping things from being utterly too complicated to even understand, you all offer human-curated playlists. Is that accurate? So at the same time, back in the day, you were helping train basically AI-curated playlists. I'm curious about how AI falls short in hospitality environments versus this human curation that you offer.
[00:18:00] Kurt Oleson: I think that's a really good question as well because AI, it's something that we've embraced in a lot of industries. The creative industry, let's say, is a lot harder to break into on the AI front, and I think for good reason. The idea that you are outsourcing these tasks that are really at the core of what is the human experience art in general is, is something that I think a lot of people really rub up against when the AI conversation comes up. Whether it's from the rights holder side, the creation side, but again, even the management side. The idea of having AI do brand management or creative for your business is a little bit harder for to swallow for some. So I think in hospitality environments, the idea of human-curated music is really powerful because it becomes that extension of your brand. It is another tool of the customer experience. It touches every customer that comes in your doors, whether they are thinking about it or not.
[00:19:14] Susan Barry: From my perspective as you were talking, I'm thinking about these memes that you see often that are like. I want AI to fold my laundry and blow-dry my hair, not write poetry and music. But if you strip away everything that's joyful from your employee or from the human beings working in your business, they're not going to keep doing it. So like, if I just have to listen to robot beep beep boops, I don't want that.
[00:19:43] Kurt Oleson: Well, and that's the other thing I need to be absolutely clear on as well, is that we do not include any AI-generated music in our catalog, either. Unlike some other companies like us, we also own and operate our entire music library. So we don't tap into a third party and just hope that what they're serving us was human-created. And curate all of our music our ourselves, because at the end of the day, when you walk in somewhere, you want to recognize. Something that you're hearing, that's what gets people excited about playing music or hearing music, right? It's like, oh, that I've got a memory associated with that, or whatever it may be.
[00:20:26] Susan Barry: It's a perfect segue to the next question, which is if everyone, like, say you and two of your competitors are all lined up, you all have access to the same catalog of songs. There's a big, but there's a finite number of songs that exist in the world, right? What differentiates one provider from the business perspective or from the end user perspective?
[00:20:53] Kurt Oleson: Yeah. Another great question and two answers to this, actually. So the first is that we don't all have the same access. Remember those pros I mentioned, some services, not ours, but some carve out certain pros for cost reasons or access reasons. They usually have different catalogs available. Now our company has all performing rights organizations and all rights covered. So we have access to virtually every song publicly available. But let's say that mostly all of everybody in our space as the same catalog, right? There may be some carve-outs here and there, but for the most part, you have the same catalog. The biggest difference that we see and that we hear from our customers, it comes with service support and partnership. And it goes back to this, you asked what changed the most when I took over as owner as opposed to being just an employee, is the accessibility of the company that you work with. And I talk about the commoditization of music a lot, but at the end of the day, do you want your partners to just be like another software service that you sign up with and it's a line item every month, or are you really treating it as some someone or some group that can provide value to your brand or the experience that you're creating in taking music as not an afterthought, but again, as something that really is a core part of what you do?
[00:22:34] Susan Barry: Ben Folds has this thing that he said in an interview one time, which is there will come another time when musicians aren't millionaires anymore. For most of human history, musicians haven't been millionaires and we're moving toward that time.
[00:22:53] Kurt Oleson: This is a much broader point again, in the creative industry. What is the value of the art of these things and accessibility, which again is something I mentioned that I thought was a benefit of being able to help train the data behind these algorithms, comes with a price. If everything is more accessible and at your fingertips and you can get it in any format you want. Well, what's the real value, the exclusivity of that piece? I think a lot of us, of a certain generation, remember going to a Tower Records or whatever it is, and buying the CD of the artists that you really liked that just released. That experience, you were investing your time and your energy to get something out of that.
[00:23:48] Susan Barry: And your discernment, because you could only get one.
[00:23:51] Kurt Oleson: And we are losing some of that. I will say though, on the other side of this, at no other point in history has it been easier for anyone who cares enough and is willing to work hard enough to promote and become a musician, an artist, a performer. Like the accessibility piece goes both ways. You can find your audience now. You don't have to go where that audience is or work with the big labels in order to bring the audience to you. You're able to find your own audience now. So there is a shift.
[00:24:42] Susan Barry: Quick side note, we are giving away a real sponsor ad read on Top Floor. Not just a shout-out, not a mention in passing, but an actual host red spot in a real episode where your brand can become part of the conversation instead of just an interruption. I keep thinking about how much noise we all swim in every day with ads, pitches, promos, and popups. And how rare it is to hear something that actually feels human. So we are opening the mic to one brand that deserves to be heard. The giveaway opens on Tuesday, February 17th and closes on March 6th, and we will announce the winner on March 10th. If you have a business with a story worth telling, visit topfloorpodcast.com/win to enter by March 6th, 2026. Okay, back to the show.
We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every episode of Top Floor with practical, tangible tips to try either in their hotels or their businesses or in their personal lives. How should music shift through the day in a hospitality environment?
[00:26:04] Kurt Oleson: So I could give the cookie-cutter answer of music should pick up in tempo throughout the day, but it really is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Our name is Custom Channels, right? There's custom is in that name. And it's not because we customize everything on your behalf, but because you have the ability to customize that music experience to really fit your needs, right? And what you wanna start with is understanding your customers, your foot traffic patterns. Do you have a lunch rush? If you're a restaurant, do you have a big lobby where people congregate if you're in the hotel space? And then you ask yourself, well, what is the desired outcome? Using, again, music as a tool, as an experienced touchpoint to drive your desired outcomes as an operator, right? Do you want to drive quicker turnover in your restaurant? Do you want people to spend more time in your lobby and use your wifi and buy a drink at the bar. That is gonna inform you on how to evolve the music throughout the day. Slower tempo, more relaxing, keeping people there, or higher energy, keeping people moving. I can't give everyone one of your listeners an answer. What I can tell you is those are the things that you should be thinking about when you consider the music, because if you don't do that, it could even work off in opposition to what you're trying to do.
[00:27:33] Susan Barry: It's a really good point that you sort of have to try to figure out what you're trying to accomplish. What about changing your music or refreshing your playlists? How often should a restaurant or a hotel realistically be doing that?
[00:27:53] Kurt Oleson: Another good question and another not one size fits all, but a more generic, better touch point or let's say anchor point for people is that your music, the negative effects of repetition typically are worse for employees than they are for customers. This is something to keep in mind. Every year there are endless articles of employees quitting or going crazy because there are only so many Christmas songs and only so many people who cover them. But I mean, it is true. So repetition is critical for both employees and customers. As a rule of thumb, the way we like to look at it, because we curate all of our playlists, we provide those playlists to our users, and we let them build and add and subtract and really create the perfect mix for themselves right at really an enterprise scale. Our rule of thumb is that having a week's worth of songs without repeating is a good starting point.
[00:29:01] Susan Barry: Whoa, how many songs is that?
[00:29:03] Kurt Oleson: So roughly, depending on your hours of operating, that would be 1500 to 2000 stocks.
[00:29:13] Susan Barry: And no repeats in a whole week?
[00:29:15] Kurt Oleson: Ideally, you have to think about because what you have to think about is that you don't want to have to be making updates all the time, right? So, say you have that as your starting point, you probably could go a month or two and it wouldn't feel that repetitive, especially using a service like custom channels, where the playback is dynamically changing every day. You're not hearing the same songs in the same order. But on top of that, what we do and what many people do in the industry, but our specialty is called rotation. So you take that base, you rotate in and out, maybe a third to a quarter of that playlist every couple of weeks. So you don't need to take 2000 songs and then find 2000 new ones and just replace the playlist. Rotation is a very powerful tool and can really extend those weeks to months if you're just doing a little bit of it right, bringing things in and out of the rotation. Some of our clients, they have a set library that they like and they approve of, and our software rotates things in and out automatically. So even though they haven't necessarily updated their library maybe over a year, it sounds very, very different or very broad, month to month.
[00:30:40] Susan Barry: Interesting. Oh, as you were saying that, I was like, oh, but what about the person who only works on Saturday afternoon every week, but that rotation takes care of that person. So they don't have to worry about it. Well, we have reached the fortune telling portion of our show, so you have to predict the future and we will come back and see if you've got it right. What is a prediction that you have about the future of AI in music curation for businesses?
[00:31:06] Kurt Oleson: We've had this exact question come up, as you would imagine in our office, AI and music curation and really as it pertains to people in the hospitality industry. I think the way I would frame it is that using AI to curate your or create your playlists is going to have a really marginal value difference than having the human curation piece of it, because at the end of the day, I still think that human curation is going to outperform it. But what are you gaining by using the AI piece, where I see AI for music curation really expanding and currently in, even currently doing so in some of the products and partnerships that we're leading right now, is in context triggering for how playlists are being rotated or played or scheduled. We talked a little bit earlier about how should a playlist evolve over the day. That actually is something that I think AI is and will continue to get better at doing right now which is okay, maybe it's your foot traffic data, it's the weather, it's an event nearby, whatever it is. And then taking those human-curated lists or those user-created lists and using the context to trigger the scheduling to trigger those shifts.
[00:32:37] Susan Barry: Got it. So you could say something like, here is our bank of 2000 songs that we know match our brand. We want these 25 to play when it's raining and these 25 to play when there's a soccer game and whatever, whatever. And have AI help with the detailed matching math problem that entails. Is that kind of what you mean?
[00:33:05] Kurt Oleson: Yeah. And everybody has a different definition of curation. I have one that other people in the company have another, but for me, curation is really about what goes into your playlist, your music library. The way in which it's laid back or scheduled, or progressed through across the day, that can be dynamically shifted following certain parameters. Like one way that we curate that's unique to us is that we create a library of songs for a customer, or we give a customer the ability to create their own. And then you set subcategories within that library. You can say, okay, there are categories A, B, and C, and we need a higher rotation of the A category every hour than the C category. And so we're not necessarily choosing what songs play in what order. Right. That's like hyper, hyper curation, which is obviously still valuable as well, but we are setting the parameters such that algorithms or potentially AI triggers can really take advantage of the playback.
[00:34:14] Susan Barry: Very interesting. Well, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about how the hospitality industry as a whole approaches music and audio, what would it be?
[00:34:26] Kurt Oleson: I did already mention this, but commoditization of art is a big societal trend, especially in our industry. We don't want to be seen again as another software subscription line item. The music, if leveraged well, becomes that tool, that experiential touchpoint, even things like between-song messaging. Like, audio is so powerful. It's the one thing in your business that will reach your customer no matter where they're looking or what they're doing at any time.
[00:35:12] Susan Barry: That's why podcast advertising is so effective.
[00:35:15] Kurt Oleson: It's so effective. Thank you to our sponsors today. But at the end of the day, I think that many people undervalue music and audio in general just because they haven't given it enough thought, not because they don't believe in the power of art and music. But because they don't see the potential that it can provide. Whether you're a space that advertising would make sense and so you do in between song ads or you're a space where the music and lighting, these elements really need to come together. It's valuable to you. And it can drive one of the phrases we have here is that, let our audio platform, the custom channels platform, become profit center. Don't treat it as a cost center. It can actually move the needle for you.
[00:36:16] Susan Barry: Okay, folks, before we tell Kurt goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told.
Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”
[00:36:28] Susan Barry: The loading dock is brought to you by Hive Marketing. At Hive, we specialize in business-to-business marketing and communications for the hospitality industry. Working with hospitality brands, operators, owners, and vendors to create content and campaigns that keep you top of mind outside the sales cycle. Visit hive-marketing.com for more information. That's hive, like a bee hive-marketing.com.
Kurt, what is a story you would only tell on the loading dock?
[00:37:02] Kurt Oleson: So this goes back to my early days at Custom Channels. And being a music service, we don't touch much of the installation component. We have a lot of partners that do that. We offer full services, but for the most part, we are your music and content partners. And back in the day, when the company started, the founders were looking at a lot of local businesses and a very, very high-end restaurant was one of the first customers here before my time, even. They're now a Michelin Star restaurant. And they were having some issues with their audio system because they shared it next door with a national chain. It was part of like an ownership group that branched off, and they were doing their own high-end concept. So, because it was local and I was new, I got to go out and troubleshoot. This was a wedge between a Michelin-star restaurant and essentially a fast-casual pizza chain. And the audio systems for both were stacked on top of each other. So the first thing I noticed is that they were swapped, so they were getting the raw music at each location. So everybody was wondering why their fast casual pizza felt so elevated and why the Michelin Star restaurant was so casual. Well, but to be honest, nobody actually noticed that part of it. There was another sort of AV issue that was actually the crux of the problem that I was able to fix, fortunately. But then, so after that visit, though, the owner of the Michelin restaurant was like, look, we love you guys. Like you're such good partners. I have a new concept. It's a chef's table, and I want every dish to accompany a song. I mean, kudos to them for coming up with a fun idea, but as you can imagine, right? They were doing two seatings a night, and they were trying to time out a song playing with when a dish was being served. And needless to say, it did not last very long. We heard sort of secondhand of like people scrambling to clear plates that weren't finished because the next song was about to start, and all these things. I will give them points for being creative on that front. When we talk about music being critical to your operations, that may have been a little bit too far in the other direction for that one.
[00:39:57] Susan Barry: That's so funny. Okay, so I have to know if you can remember, were the songs matched up like this dish has apples, so we're gonna play, don't sit under the apple tree with anybody else but me. Or was it a little bit more subtle than that?
[00:40:14] Kurt Oleson: So it was more subtle than that. I think what it was, if I remember correctly, was that the artists like Roots were based on the location of the dish. Like where they were sourcing ingredients or something like that. It was a very, yeah, it was a very interesting approach.
[00:40:36] Susan Barry: Let's say a convoluted and confusing situation for all concerned, I'm sure.
[00:40:42] Kurt Oleson: Yes. Yes, exactly.
[00:40:45] Susan Barry: Kurt Olson, thank you so much for shining a light on an area that I know a lot of people don't even know exists, and I think it's so fascinating. I really enjoyed it, and I appreciate you riding up to the top floor.
[00:40:57] Kurt Oleson: Well, thanks so much for having me, Susan. It's been an absolute pleasure.
[00:41:02] Susan Barry: Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/233. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all-around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like.
[00:41:37] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 850-404-9630 to be featured in a future episode.