10 Questions with ... Beville Dunkerly

BRIEF CAREER SYNOPSIS:

In her current role as Dir./Artis Marketing & Label Relations at Pandora, Beville Dunkerly oversees helping artists across all genres realize unique opportunities through Pandora's playlists, events, and projects. Before taking on this role at Pandora, Dunkerly enjoyed a diverse music industry background, including time at WSM-FM/Nashville as morning co-host; Rolling Stone as Sr. Editor of Rolling Stone Country; and AOL Music, where she helped launch "The Boot." Beville recently chatted with All Access Nashville about what her current day-to-day job at Pandora consists of, and why Pandora remains the leading streaming platform.

1. Beville, thanks for taking time for "10 Questions." Let's start with your current role with Pandora. Explain your title, what the job involves, and what your day-to-day looks like.

I'm the Head of Artist Marketing & Label Relations, Nashville. What I love about that is that it's all of Nashville, and actually, Franklin, too. I work with musicians, labels, publicists, managers, and agents from everything to getting their music heard on our platform to developing special playlists, to teaming up with advertisers on branded projects such as themed mixtapes and 1,500-person events. The really great thing is that no day is the same, because I'm on a revolving door of projects, which is really fun. I've spent 20-something years in the business, and I've never had such a collaborative job with the entire industry; it's been a great ride so far.

2. Let's back up for a second and talk about your path to Pandora - it's a diverse one, involving radio, a previous stop in the digital world, and a celebrated run heading up Rolling Stone Country. Did your diversity happen intentionally or coincidentally?

Very coincidentally. I went to Vanderbilt to be a teacher. I'm from Alabama and didn't even like Country music growing up, but you can't avoid it in this town, and thankfully so, because I fell in love with Country music. That's what lead me in to the industry. And honestly, I keep getting laid off! I started out at in television, at WTVF, then went over to WSM and got lucky with an audition there, and went directly to overnights and weekends, reporting the news and sports. I really learned the music industry that way. I moved to New York after I got laid off there, and in a typical, "dumb blonde" move, I got on the wrong bus in New York City and ran in to an old college friend, who told me that AOL Music was hiring and looking for someone who knew Country music So, I ended up there for nine years, doing everything from programming stations on AOL Radio to booking AOL sessions, which used to be a big thing back in the day; we had everyone from Beyoncé to Keith Urban to Paul McCartney doing sessions for us. I also helped start two different websites for AOL - Spinner, which was the Rock website, and The Boot. After nine years, AOL Music closed its doors, so I started writing for Rolling Stone the very next day. It's funny, because so many kids at Vanderbilt have asked for my advice, and I don't want to denounce their resume and how important school is for them, but every job I've ever gotten has been about networking. It's who you know that gets you in the door, then Vanderbilt impresses. So, I've been trying to not discourage them, but tell them it's about who you know and what you do to meet these people. I got very lucky with having friends at Rolling Stone who heard about the lay-offs at AOL and grabbed me the second my contract would allow.

3. At Rolling Stone, you had a different seat than the one at All Access or other industry trades do, in that you were consumer-faced. How does change how you covered the format? Did you have to create a filter of sorts and leave out some "inside baseball" aspects to the music biz?

There was a totally different strategy - you're right - but what I loved about Rolling Stone was that when I was there, the magazine was staying true to its roots of being mostly about the music. We tried so hard not to delve too much in to the personal lives of the artists and make it more about the music, because we knew that our readers were music geeks. They are people who care about how many different types of guitars are in Keith Urban's collection; they care about the fact that Dave Cobb is producing this unknown artist who might be the next Stapleton, and they know who Dave Cobb is. It was really neat to cater to that type of fan, where before, I was working for AOL and The Boot, and we were instructed to report on as many divorces and babies and marriages and personal things as possible, and it got uncomfortable. Click bait sells, and I get that, but I loved the fact that at Rolling Stone, we could make it all about the music and still succeed.

4. When the term music streaming service is mentioned, the "go-to," top-of-mind brand is usually Spotify, and yet, Pandora was first in the category and continues to out-perform those other guys. Can you explain the critical differences between these two services, and why Pandora enjoys the actual advantage?

Now that Pandora has on-demand streaming, the main difference is that Spotify is international, and Pandora is U.S. only. So, [Spotify's] numbers are huge, as they should be. But in Country music, our numbers outperform all of our competitors, and, I might get in trouble for saying this, but I almost equate that to Pandora being the comfortable old shoe. Pandora's been around for almost two decades; it's free, if you choose the free tier over the on-demand subscription. Almost a third of adult Americans have a Pandora account, whether they remember it or not! My parents still watch the ABC nightly news at 5:30p every night, and it's just what they've done for years and years; they wouldn't even think to tape it and watch it later. Pandora has been around for so long - it's that habitual thing - and, that's why it resonates with Country fans so much. If you look at what songs are streaming the most on any platform, I guarantee it's gonna be recurrents over new singles. It's the catalog hits, the "Friends In Low Places," it's the "This One's For The Girls" - those songs still have millions of streams every week, because Country fans love familiarity. And, Pandora is the familiar one.

5. You mention that recurrents are the most-streamed songs on Pandora. Has that been the case for a long time, or is that cyclical? Because, in radio, you see stations pull back and go to the familiar, based on music cycles in the format.

I wish I had the numbers to back this up off the top of my head, but I don't, but I know recurrents, as a collective whole, do better than newer music on Pandora in the Country world. That's not to say that if Luke Bryan has a red-hot #1 song, of course it's gonna be his most-streamed song that week or that quarter, because it's programmed in so many places, and it's running on so many stations - Most Pandora listeners are also listening to terrestrial radio, so the familiarity factor is also coming from them driving around, listening to terrestrial in their car. But, if you look at Luke's catalog as a whole, or someone like Garth Brooks, it's gonna be those huge, monster hits that everyone still loves and everyone and their daughter know every single lyric to.

6. At this year's "Music Biz" conference, you appeared in a panel and had some direct words for terrestrial radio, Can you elaborate on what radio is missing?

When I was on the morning show at WSM-FM, our drive-time playlist was no more than 22 songs deep - probably shorter than that. And we weren't taking chances on new artists; it got so old to hear the same song over again, and we couldn't take chances on new artists. We hardly ever played artists that weren't on UMG, Sony, Warner, or Big Machine, and it was frustrating, because - from a very selfish perspective - in this job, so much of your satisfaction is breaking new acts and helping with music discovery, and you're just not getting that at terrestrial. Honestly, big kudos to guys like Bobby Bones and John Marks and Pandora's head of country programming, Rachel Whitney, because those are the programmers who are taking chances, but I think they really had to work their way up and make huge names for themselves before they could do that. Your average DJs have to go by what their music programmer is telling them to do. You hope that everybody can eventually have the power that Bobby or John Marks or Rachel have. I've admired John Marks so long for using his platform for artist discovery and not seemingly caring if an A-Lister from a giant label has a placement on his playlist, because he would rather give that coveted spot to someone who really needs it. That's why John, Bobby, and Rachel are becoming a part of these artists' success stories. You look at Florida Georgia Line, and in any interview, they give about the start of their career, they name-check John Marks, and that's fabulous. It's a great career strategy on his part. I really admire programmers who do that. Particularly with Rachel Whitney at Pandora, she is a tireless champion of getting more women on the radio and making sure her stations and playlists are as equal as they can be, given the music that's delivered to us. She's always taking chances on female artists and making sure they have as much of a voice as the guys do on the radio.

7. Speaking of female artists and lack of exposure, this is often laid at the feet of Country radio. At Pandora, is this even a thing? It seems like a streaming platform has so much more bandwidth, so to speak, to accommodate female music discovery and exposure.

We absolutely do. And, when the opportunity isn't there, we create it. We have a whole "Women In Country" station, specifically for that reason. There are so many more opportunities because of the mood stations - the "Chill Country," the "Backyard Barbeque," stuff like that. There's a lot more opportunity rather than strictly going by the charts.

8. Also, I just posted a column today, examining Luke Combs songs - one is a smash at radio ("She Got The Best Of Me"), while the other ("Beautiful Crazy") is a digital sensation. I know Pandora can and does play both, but do you think we'll see more of this? [The Stone Door Media Lab]President Jeff Green told me, "Labels and radio no longer have the advantage or luxury of being able to fully manage what the public gets to hear or when." Would you agree?

I don't quite agree with that, because I do think we are still trained to "go by the focus track." However, our doors are open so much wider to trying out different tracks that might not be recommended to us. But if you're talking about hand programming, I think we're still in a very single-driven world. On the flip side of that, if I'm talking to a new artist asking for advice on how to break in to the streaming world, I would recommend delivering at least three songs at a time. You don't want just one song streaming, because you hit a fan with that one song, and they wanna hear more, then they can't find anything else from you - that's exactly how you lose the fan. It's a weird dichotomy. You can't over-saturate the streaming market, right? So, put as much music out there as possible, and what you can do is hope that, with services like Pandora, that the algorithm will place different songs where they fit, regardless of genre labels.

9. In my piece, Shane Allen at Columbia Nashville said, "Metrics can point us to the next single." Do you feel - or, have you seen any data - that suggests heavy streamers follow music to radio?

Absolutely. In the instances where we've tested out a couple of tracks to help the label and/or manager decide what the next focus track should be, they're really looking at granular data from us to see which songs are raising their hands. Again, that's why I tell people, "If you can release several songs at a time in the streaming world, do it, because you're gonna gain a bigger fan base and see what's working and what's not.