Eddie found every topic of the class interesting. The class consisted of mostly music industry people wanting to know more about other areas of the business. The students ranged from newly signed artists to legal professionals such as Willie Nelson's attorney. The topics of the class that I recall Eddie expressing interest are as follows:

1. Promotion: As an aspiring artist, Eddie was always looking for original and effective ways to promote his work. Any unique idea that a record company was using to promote their acts was of interest to him. The promotion topics ranged from how and why record companies use certain packaging(color, size, etc.) for certain artists to budgets and timeliness. For example, he found it interesting that record companies do minimal promotion for well established groups in the first month of album release. They do this because they know that the die hard fans will come out first to buy the record, and they can also rely on the large amounts of publicity (reviews, etc.) to promote the new release without spending much money.

2. Publicity: The difference in a publicist and a promoter is that a publicist generates 'free advertising' such as articles, reviews, interviews, etc. by supplying the necessary information needed for the outside entity to promote the record companies artist. Eddie was in particular interest of the extremes that some of these publicists have gone to promote their bands. In the past it was very common for them to purposely plant false and sleazy information to the media to draw attention to an artist lacking in ticket or record sales. Many times the artist's weren't even aware of these actions. For example, a publicist for a metal band in the 80's once allegedly planted a rumor to the media that one of the band members was arrested for having oral sex with a minor in a backstage closet. Yeah, just great.

3. Distribution: Eddie was interested in the deals each record label had with distributors to get their music onto the store shelves around the world. One of the bigger distributors back in 1986 was WEA (Warner Elecktra Asylum). The politics of the distributorships were very interesting to him. "Why did they form ?", "What were their motivations?".