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Interview Transcription

Jasna Burza
Oh my goodness Ian, welcome to Business Spotlight.

Ian Levitt
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really looking forward to this already such

Jasna Burza
an honor for me because you and I go way back I ever heard of you may you? Our goodness, it feels like an almost a long time ago years ago.

Ian Levitt
Yeah, like four or five years probably.

Jasna Burza
Isn’t it amazing how time just flies all you have evolved in studio Americana. Rich, Ian is the founder, the owner of it has really morphed and become a became, over the last few years, a true leader in audio production, for top notch audio books that authors are creating, and also some of the leading podcasts locally and nationally. So it’s kind of an exciting thing to talk to you about all things audio. So tell us a little bit about studio Americana about yourself. And how did you get started in this business?

Ian Levitt
Well, thank you. Yeah, well, as I said about maybe about five years ago, is when we started and I, I think it was that first year that you and I met as well. And I started this because I had done radio for about 20 years, I’d been on the air off the air background, helping run radio stations, all that sort of thing. And I just saw where I where I thought radio was going. And I saw where podcasting was going and thought, you know, I can bring these two things together, I’ve learned these skills, I have teams of people that know how to do this really well. Let’s help anybody that wants to make at the time, I was just thinking podcasts, let’s help them make it by taking all the pain points away, not having technical issues, and just kind of having a team to answer and help with everything. So we started that in a physical studio back in 2017. When COVID had in 2020, we went remote in a myriad of different ways. So actually expanded our national audience quite a bit during that period, our audio books, and even just the ability to do this remotely has, I would kind of say, revolutionized how our business has changed over the last couple of years. And now we do have one local studio in Edina as well, some people use it for podcasts, some for audiobooks, and we maintain a pretty large, remote audience as well. So it’s not exactly what I expected five years into the business. But I always knew that I was going to be learning the whole time. That was we launched in 2017. And business podcasts were emerging then. But they weren’t I don’t think where they are now. But I saw that that’s where it was going to go. So I said, Let’s just get this off the road now and learn as we go. And we really have so

Jasna Burza
in love that you know, when you were listening to you, it’s the signal or sign of a true revolutionary and a true entrepreneur is someone who figures out where the trends are going like what’s happening, you knew the podcasting was going to be huge before it was even here. And also being able to be supple and move with the changes such as pandemic and adjust. It is a really good reminder for all of us who are like, Oh, how do I do? I have to pivot again. And yet sometimes in the pivoting the greatest gifts arise for all of us. Yeah, absolutely. So tell me I’m very curious though, podcasting, right? Very often, it’s like you Well, I need to be in a studio, I need incredible equipment. I need it, whether it’s an audio book, how does it work for people who contact you, you know, virtually like how I would love to learn more about that?

Ian Levitt
Sure. Well, let me see you mentioned audiobooks. So let me start that side of it. Because audiobooks have a requirement, especially if you’re going to submit to someone like Audible Amazon, all of that they do have some basic technical requirements. That what we did after starting our audiobooks, we started making those our technical requirements for podcasts as well. So that the producers and the editors, whether we were doing an audio book or a podcast, we kind of had this very standard criteria of what everything needed to sound like and the kind of specifications that needed to be within. So that was a fun thing that we learned starting up in the audiobooks. But the way that people do it in most cases, again, with audiobooks is they’ll either come in to one of our studios, or we have these remote kits that we will send to their location. We just wrapped up one in DC and in upstate New York, where we just sent out a kit to these people. We helped them get it all set up, make sure the audio specifications are good. And then we run the whole thing over zoom. Nobody on our team is leaving the Twin Cities, but we’re producing an audio book for somebody up in, you know, White Plains, New York. So that has been a tremendous experience. But in terms of how you do it, there’s there’s no set way of doing it. We’ve tried to be very flexible with that. But I think having at least a baseline level of audio quality, whether it’s for your podcast and definitely for an audio book just helps at least take the distraction away the content is always going to be the thing that brings people back. But if you can also provide audio that a isn’t distracted, and ideally has a nice sound to it, I think you go that next level up, in podcasting,

Jasna Burza
it really does make a difference I listened to, you know, an audible addict here is good audio really makes a difference. But not only that, earlier, when we were getting ready to say you can actually get rejected by these platforms that sell audio books, if your audio files are not up to certain specifications or quality.

Ian Levitt
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it is a bit of a technical jargon about it. But basically, it’s saying that you need to be this loud compared to how quiet the room is. So if you have something going on in the background, or if you try to just cut all the audio behind you, in digital form, that’s not going to, you know, pass specifications. And we have heard horror stories, I have not had to work with anybody that’s had this happen yet. But we have heard horror stories about people going through, you know, 1020 hours of recording an audio book, doing their edits, doing their reduced by themselves, sending it in only to find that the quality of audio they recorded was not within specification, and there’s really nothing to be done at that point. So it isn’t, I wouldn’t say necessarily a difficult level to achieve. But they are very specific about again, how loud it has to be the background noise, not having extraneous sounds, mouth noise retakes all that sort of thing. And that’s important as a baseline, what I have found to be even more important is that once you submit that, what that audio book, and it’s out there to the public, the public’s gonna review it, you know, you want audio sales, you want to make sure that it’s something that people want to listen to, that I think is the even more critical audience than necessarily the internal people at Audible is the people that are doing the reviews. So that’s why it’s the audio quality is important, but also being comfortable with the text, delivering it in a way that is authentic. And not just reading words on a page, because those sorts of things can be judged very harshly online, we all know what online reviews can look like,

Jasna Burza
Oh, that’s so true. It’s it’s a mighty investment for every author, and they really wanted to put their work out there and an audio version. So in terms of like, sounding natural, and really doing that, because I’m working on a book. So you’re gonna hear from me, eventually, the coaching, how to make it more dynamic. Is that something do you provide in the process?

Ian Levitt
Yeah, we do help people with that. And, you know, we’re not overtly hands on and say, No, I think you need to read it this way. But we try and give a gentle push, when it’s, you know, maybe we need to try that, again, with a different emphasis on it or something like that. And what we what we found has been really helpful as, as opposed to starting an audio book and planning to do a 1015 hour long audio book from the start, we do what we call right now call an audio book demo, which is a 30 Minute, just like you would record in the audio book where they go in the studio, or they have the kid at their location. And we do 30 minutes, just like you would do with the book. And that means the cadence, the how much editing is going to be involved, the amount of retakes that we have, we get a really good snapshot of that. And the person doing it gets a really good feel of what it’s like to record an audio book without actually going through the whole process. And because it can be anywhere from 1200 to $7,000, depending on what that book is. So I think the, you know, the main thing for people to think about when they’re doing that as far as the delivery, and again, we’re happy to help coach people through it. But being comfortable with the text, I think is the most important part, you do not have to be necessarily a professional narrator. But if you’re reading the book that you wrote, The having, not only having the you know, the knowledge of the tax, but also the emotions that you intended to put through in that text, letting that come out in the read as well. People are not expecting you to be a performance artist. They’re not even looking for that in most cases, but they are looking to feel the the emotion of the book as well. And it doesn’t have to be even if that’s a self help book still having that. That emotion in your cadence is very important.

Jasna Burza
Oh, I love that. I mean makes a difference. It really does when we’re listening and the demo option you talked about is it’s also really good way to give people an estimate for how much the final audio Look who’s going to cost because then you can tell how many retakes you need to take, etc. And that’s only $300, which is crazy.

Ian Levitt
Well, you know, we’re looking, we want people to go into this experience, knowing that it’s the right decision for them, both for us and for them. And I think having that that time in the studio and that experience to say, Okay, this is what it felt like, this is what we could do better. This is what went really well, and why I’m going to really like this project. And then for our team to be able to say, as you said, Here’s exactly how long this book is going to be. Here’s how long it’s gonna take us to record it. Here’s how much we expect to spend on editing or retakes. And here’s the cost of that. And it’s really having that demo has allowed us to give very accurate estimates for that. So yeah, I don’t I don’t mind that it’s not an overpriced item, we just want to make, make sure everybody’s making the right decision.

Jasna Burza
I love that. That’s the beginning, always great partnerships, because you know what to expect, and there’s an alignment, it’s always really well in them invested in peace of the journey, you know, I got a chance to be in your studio and experience the magic behind when I was interviewed for a podcast by Jenna years ago. And you ever heard the quality was really amazing. And I have to say, for my podcast, which is very interesting, a lot of my Switching now to a podcast, a lot of my conversations are on Zoom. My guests sometimes don’t have the greatest audio, sometimes I can hear the shuffling of their, you know, headphones, and I’ve just kind of given up on a lot of those and having perfect audio. So tell us why it’s still very important to have good quality audio for those. Or is it because I have noticed that because of the zoom? I don’t even Yeah, I feel like I accept those those little mistakes, psychologically, because I’m like, Well, we’re just doing the best that I can that we can.

Ian Levitt
Yeah. And I, you know, I go back to making it not distracting, I think is the biggest point. And you’re right, I think there is a level of that that has come over the last several years where there is a level of expectation of, you know, the person is talking into their laptop, it isn’t going to sound like a narrator reading an audio book. But there’s a lot you can do as a participant, and in post production, to at least take out the distracting aspects of it. I think one of the ones I see the most resume is this person’s really loud in this person’s pretty quiet, right. And you know that there’s all sorts of technical reasons that happens. But it’s basically because you have two different people at two locations on two different computers doing two different things. And one thing I do like specifically about zoom and how we run our operations, is that it does allow you a feature to export everybody’s tracks separately, which is what our team always does when we record because we can go in and based on those specifications I was talking earlier, we go to every single person’s track and make sure their loudness is the right spot that we want it to be and that it’s even with everybody else. We do some work on D reverb in thing I think that open boomy reverb is something we hear a lot with zoom as well. And so that’s something that we deal with in kind of our pre stage of producing a podcast. And ours is very involved. I mean, we work with a lot of professionals doing podcasts. So we have a producer that is there, the entire time we start the session, there’s a producer taking notes, handling any technical issues. And then while the recording is going, they’re marking all the arms and us and the paper shuffling. And I mean, we even work this into our process where one of the other things we find on Zoom is people kind of talk over each other because there’s this little time gap lapse, and they can and, and those moments can be awkward in the actual recording. But because we take all of those separate files out at the end, we actually will mute you know, the person that accidentally came in or whichever part of that that interaction was kind of clumsy, we can take it out, cut it up. So that just feels like it went exactly as it should have gone without those kind of stumbles in the middle. So all that sort of stuff is is marked by our producer during the podcasts sent to our editors. And then we make, you know, a nice clean podcast for the client within the next week.

Jasna Burza
So I love that a quick turnaround to

Ian Levitt
Yeah, we do next day turnaround. Our standard is one week, but we offer everything up to next day.

Jasna Burza
So that’s incredible. It’s so interesting. As I’m hearing you’re saying I’m hearing your audio right mind is going to be the Zoom audio that’s a little echoey And yours is just so perfect. And it’s really pleasant to listen to an affirmation of how important this is. So we have the authors who want excellent audio for their books. And we have the professional podcasters, like Joe Rogan, right? Or some of our local celebrities for the their, their level where they just need a studio and producers and all that. What about for all of us service providers who have podcasts and hope of reaching the market? And what are the ways to work with you that where people are now maybe making a lot of money that they can still use your services produce excellent content?

Ian Levitt
Yeah, well, absolutely. And I’ll tell you, I would say probably 75 to 80% of our clients are exclusively on Zoom. Oftentimes, it’s because we’re working with people across the country, but it’s just become, even though not everybody wants to spend their day on Zoom, I found that the podcast side, people don’t mind it so much, it’s kind of nice to see everybody, you get a lot quicker access to people across the country that we hadn’t really weren’t really doing pre pandemic weren’t taking advantage as much of all the different guests you could get across the country. But doing it over zoom with a producer is is what we do with at least like I said, probably about 65 to 75% of our clients. Now, a lot of people and one of the other clients I really enjoy working with is people that are doing the podcast on their own. But as I said, they, you know, they deal with that Zoom issue where one side is too loud, and the other ones too quiet. And, you know, there were a couple of spots that they would like to have cleaned up. So we’ll have people just send that audio to us. And we can easily master the tracks together, send it over, and even make you know cuts if they let us know where in that they’re looking for. So that ala carte editing is a big part of what we do for people as well. But I think you know, in terms of even if you’re not working with us, just things to do in general, on the podcast is make sure that if you’re doing a zoom call like this, you don’t have sounds going on around you that you are silencing your phone that you know, I think there’s a lot of basic things you can do to get that sound quality optimal. Because like you said, yes, you’re talking on a on a laptop, you know, you’re talking to a computer in a room, but your sound doesn’t throw me off. It does. I don’t find it distracting, I think it’s very much what people expect on on, on Zoom calls. And on podcasts, you know, the distraction is when you’re having packet loss and things are cutting out or there’s somebody is really booming and somebody else is really quiet, you know, that can kind of ruin a podcast. Whereas if you just are able to on your own or can have somebody help normalize all those audio levels and just get it even even if you didn’t make a cut after that if you just kept it raw, but have the audio levels mastered with each other, you can have a much more listen to this podcast at the end of the day. Doesn’t matter if everybody’s on Zoom.

Jasna Burza
Oh, I love that. This is why I love this Business Spotlight, among many things is the quality and the caliber of people who come on because we features like some of the most remarkable people that we have locally. And then always this level of generosity with tips and helpful nuggets for people they can be used in every single day. Well, I have really been a fan of studio Americana. Because I feel like I know you more than most through through my marketing director Jana, and she just loves you to pieces and has a tremendous amount of respect. And through her I feel I have grown to have the same level of respect and affinity towards your work, but also incredible respect for the integrity of the work that you do, I think that it would you have done is establish yourself in a level of like, I produce great work, but I do have integrity. And I do it with them in a way that that really honors everyone that I work with. And that is just so beautiful to watch because it is not unfortunately as common as we would like it to be. So I it’s one of

Ian Levitt
the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me, thank you. Oh, it’s

Jasna Burza
really honest. And it’s really true. And I think it’s a testament to who you are as a person and business owner as well. And I’ve heard also incredible things from Julie Burton about the work that you have been doing with her as well. So, so many people in the community who are really raving and I think I always tell people listen, the my reputation precedes me and that is such kind of a beautiful thing that when we’re known by who we are by the character of who we are not just the the flashy branding, etc.

Ian Levitt
Sure. Well yeah, I mean, yeah, that that means a lot to me both your comments and yes, that we are an ethical company that you know, works for our clients. That is, these are the people that we have close relationships with. I mean, podcasting, audiobooks, both of them, I didn’t think about this before going into it, but it is a very intimate relationship with you and the client. And and so like, like it or not, you get we all get to know each other really well. And, and yeah, I tried to, you know, I, I’ve always wanted to have a good quality of work, no matter what I do. This is one of the reasons there’s things we don’t do in our business, because I have a baseline of saying, if we’re going to do this, if we’re going to get into this thing, you know, we have to be really good at it. And, and so there are some fun things I think we’re going to do as we go into 2023. But I have slow rolled a lot of the new services we offer, because I want to make sure that that level of quality that I think we do have a reputation for always remains as is or gets better. Oh, I

Jasna Burza
love that makes me so happy. I better I better stay abreast and really in touch with everything that you have to offer. So where can we learn about these new developments? And also the services that you offer? I know that the websites studio Americana, we can find all that information. But where else should people go? And why don’t you tell us the exact web address that people can follow?

Ian Levitt
Sure, well, our website is just the name of the company studio americana.com, I can get a lot of information there. Especially if you’re looking for contact. There’s multiple emails where you can reach me but you can always just hit me up directly. It’s my first name E and I a n at Studio americana.com. I have, you know, we have social media, Twitter, Facebook, all of that. I’m working right now on really tackling my LinkedIn because that is, I think, probably my most natural audience, but I have just as a person, if we’re talking about who people are, I have never been a highly active social media user, which is a terrible thing to say, in 2023. But I’m getting back into it. And I think following me on following us the company or myself on LinkedIn, you’re gonna start to see a lot more over the next month of what we’re going to do for the next year.

Jasna Burza
I love that well it’s a fine line right with the social media like how do I use utilize it but now become subject to it because there’s also conversation that maybe we should be consuming just a little less every day for format doses and balance in all things. But for for all of us. Listening to this whether you’re live on Facebook or listening to this later on on YouTube, or the podcasts are the stories are everywhere, where this will end up Tik Tok. I think it is very important to understand that we as creators, have a voice and unless we put our voice forward, people are not going to have this opportunity to get to know us to work with us and develop that relationship. And even if you feel like well, I’m going to go down the rabbit hole doing it myself. I think getting started with a professional and getting comfortable in the sea of podcasting. learning the ins and outs can be one of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves.

Ian Levitt
And you know, I will I will tell you as well people are certainly welcome to send me an email I get questions all the time. So if you have a quick question about your podcast Hey, what’s the deal with that just shoot me an email again it’s in studio Americana.

Jasna Burza
So again, forgive this is why I love this man so much and everyone that we have been talking to this self this generous in very genuine intention of being of service and this is why I’m so grateful to share this incredible state in the city with you and to know you en studio Americana. This is the company we’re going to put links above and below and that aside wherever you will find this piece of content. But thank you so much for taking the time. I know you’re very busy. And I really appreciate you coming and really sharing this this work because it is timely it is it is important.

Ian Levitt
Thank you. Yes and I appreciate it. And thank you also to Jen I know she’s behind the scenes but love working with her and and and all the kind words and just grit. Thank you. This has been wonderful.

Jasna Burza
It’s been such a pleasure all folks that make sure that you check out studio Americana. And follow in on all the social media channels. You can find out all the upcoming updates and changes that they’re going to be introducing and thank you so much. Until next time. Thank you. Bye