Digital Social Hour
Wade Martin: Former Top Producer Exposes the Dark Side of Fame, Sex & the Music Industry | DSH #1643
27 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What are Wade Martin's views on modern relationships and narcissism?
Women today just irk me. They really do. I mean, women have always had a tendency of being a little bit narcissistic, the pretty ones especially. But today, women are just beyond narcissistic. Like, how many selfies a day do you need to post? They're so self-absorbed. And I feel sorry for them because what's going to end up happening is they're going to grow old and realize, oh, crap, I'm old.
And they're going to lose their value to the men that have been taking them on trips, giving them money or what have you. It's not going to be a happy ending for them. Okay, guys, got Wade here. This is actually his first interview ever, which is pretty crazy considering all the things this man has done in his life. But thanks for choosing my platform, man. Well, for sure. First podcast.
First podcast. Yes, yes, yes. And I'm honored to be here. Thank you. Yeah, because you've had a lot of experience, been in a lot of industries, 25 years as a music producer. Yeah, 25. That's a quarter of a decade, man. Yeah, I know. I know. And they were painful years. The whole way through or near the later end? Uh, honestly, most of it, most of it.
Um, I had a, an addiction to, you know, cars, women, you know, and those things are expensive. So there was a point where I had to take on certain gigs for money. Not that I wanted to, but you know, I was like, again, driven by, I need the nice house and nice cars and what have you. And, uh,
Toward the end of my career, I got to the point where I fortunately accumulated enough pennies together to where I didn't need to do that anymore. And I think the straw that broke the camel's back, Sean, was when I was in studio about four or five years ago with this influencer that I was producing for Universal. Yeah. And she was 17 years old.
I'm not going to name names, but she was 17 years old. Never released a record before in her life. Had, I don't know, something like 15 million followers or something like that. Anyway, so I was in the studio with her and she was literally telling me how to do my job in the studio.
And after all the things that, you know, Britney Spears put me through at the beginning of my career and all that, I was, I got to a point where I was like, you know what? I'm done. Um, I told her I'm done. And she was like, what? And I was like, get out of the studio. I've had enough. And, uh, paid a fine to Universal Studios for not completing the contract. I was like, you know, I'm done.
And that was again, the straw that broke the camel's back. I just didn't want to
uh deal with artists anymore and technically speaking she wasn't an artist she was a she was a creator right um but she thought she was an artist so like you've not sold one record in your life what are you doing yeah it's interesting um with artists they just seem to develop an ego over time i guess with all this success right and then they take it out on the people around them
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Chapter 2: What led Wade Martin to quit producing music for influencers?
Now times have changed, though, because I just read an article that nightclubs are struggling and they can't afford DJs. Is that true? I don't know. When I retired four years ago, I completely disconnected myself from anything to do with the entertainment business, honestly. Wow. So it messed you up that badly that you were just like... I'm scarred.
I'm scarred to the point now where I don't have any celebrity friends anymore. I've removed them from my life. Wow. Yeah. Almost cut them out like a cancer. I know that's a horrible, horrible, judgmental thing to say, but just like celebrities are, to me, demonic. Do you think that's every single celebrity? Yeah. Uh, no, that's not fair to say, but a majority, a majority, a majority.
And I think I've just got PTSD to the point where now I just don't want to be around a celebrity. I don't care if it's a movie star. I don't care if it's an artist, what have you. And a lot of people that I'm around is like, oh, we're going to go see so-and-so and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I'm so over it. I just don't want to do it. Yeah. Yeah.
I guess to get to that point of fame, you have to sell yourself out in a way, right? Yeah. Like they call it selling your soul or whatever. And to an extent, I think it's true. Yeah, 100%. I mean, there are some, you know, like, for example, Paul McCartney, super sweet guy. A lot of your viewers probably won't know who that is. I heard of him. But Beatles, again, a very huge star.
Super humble, very polite, would be attentive whenever you're talking to him. Won't be, like, gazing off wondering, you know, who's... Who's the next person they need to talk to? You know what I mean? So very genuine in nature. So they do exist, but usually they're the old school people, not the new generation. Did you like the fame back in the day when you were in that industry?
Like, did you like being around famous people? Uh, that's a great question. I don't think I really thought about it. Uh, because the way it would work is they would come to my studio and I was there to do a job. Yeah. You know what I mean?
So I didn't really have the luxury of indulging this, you know, oh, I'm enjoying being around this person that everyone knows because I'm like, I'm, I'm having to, uh, make sure that the record label is happy. A&R is happy, that the artist is happy, making sure that I'm doing my job correctly. I'm juggling all of these different things at the same time.
So I'm not really indulging the personal feeling of, oh, this is cool. I'm working with so-and-so. Got it. So you treated it strictly as a business? Yeah, for the most part. Yeah. Respect. Yeah. And that was probably when social media was just emerging. So it didn't matter as much, I guess, to Yeah, correct. A lot of folks would ask me today, oh, do you have pictures with so-and-so?
I was like, well, you know, 15 years ago, it wasn't like this whole selfie with a person thing. It just wasn't like that. You know what I mean? Whereas now everyone's taking a picture of everything. Oh, look, I'm eating this food. Oh, I'm taking a crap. Oh, look, you know what I mean? They're taking pictures of everything. It wasn't like that then. And you had eight studios you built out.
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Chapter 3: How has technology changed the music industry according to Wade?
The other one was in Phoenix. Yeah, I got into building my own recording studios. I liked it. I liked it. knowing everything about, you know, the construct of where I'm recording and acoustics and all of that sort of stuff. So I was really hip to that. That's interesting. I didn't know Vegas had the number one studio back in the day. Yeah. Yeah, I did.
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Kind of like, you know, the audiophile side of music is kind of obsolete also. Yeah, a lot's changed. Yeah, absolutely. Everyone's recording on laptops now. So the need for recording studios has basically gone bye-bye. Damn. So are all those out of business now? For the most part, most of the major recording studios are gone. You know what I mean?
They're not needed anymore because, well, technology. You know, I mean, crikey. It's like... You can do virtually anything on a laptop now, and the power of a laptop supersedes the power of the supercomputer that I had running my studio 10 years ago. Holy crap. You know, it's just technology. Did you see that change coming at all, or was it super broke? Oh, you did? Yeah, I did.
I saw the change coming in the early 2000s, actually. I had a commercial studio that I built in Beverly Hills, across from the Beverly Center, actually. Um, and I was getting a quarter of a million dollar contracts roughly from most of the major record labels to record an album, which, you know, your viewers probably won't know what an album is.
An album is a collection of usually, you know, 10 to 16 songs, you know, that would be called an album. Again, I'm trying to educate here. so um what happened was my lucrative contracts for doing these albums and i was probably netting i don't know maybe like 120 130 000 so i was my my profit margin was good um but what happened was almost overnight these same record labels were farming out uh
album deals to me and they're like, you know, would you take $80,000? So from quarter of a million dollars to all of a sudden $80,000. And what was happening was these click producers that were using at the time garage band and all of these other platforms were in essence, um, uh, doing pre-production in their bedrooms.
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