I recently spoke with former WWF announcer Sean Mooney about his Prime Time With Sean Mooney podcast on Podbean, his Wrestlemania weekend plans, participating in new WWE projects and much more; transcribed highlights (credit to Bill Pritchard for Wrestlezone.com) from the interview are below.
Mooney comments on the new premium format of his show, why he decided to move in this direction after moving his Prime Time podcast off of MLW:
I’m still doing some stuff with MLW Radio Network, but what it came down to, especially when you are starting a podcast—it’s kind of an ‘assessment period’ to see if you’re going to get a lot of listeners and it’s how advertisers go about putting spots on your show. You have 90 days and then hope to after that period pick up some advertisers. So we did very well, about eight months in we had about 1.2 million downloads, but the advertisers coming on with us was very slow. We had a few, but podcasting is really in the hands of advertisers; they pretty much control that entire environment. Nobody wants to do these for free. It’s a lot of work, and you put a lot of hours into it and they set the rates. There’s no standard of ‘if you have so many downloads this translates into this price’ it’s more like they try and determine what level you’re on. They are very slow to pay, and it’s across the board. It just got to the point—and I started after the 20th episode with the guest format, where I brought on new guests every week—things continued to grow with downloads, but it hit everybody across the board. It got to the point where you couldn’t depend on these advertisers. I have a lot of people helping me, helping on social platforms, which has dramatically improved in the last couple of months, and volunteered basically, to do graphics for the show, and I have a producer. I want to be able to take care of everybody, and I just couldn’t depend on advertisers.
There was kind of a standard before where the main podcast would be free and if they do a premium, they put up something like ‘bonus material’. I’ve always felt like ‘boy, that’s kind of backwards’ because you want your best material and why are you going to do that? Why wouldn’t you make that [main show] premium? You use bonus material to entice people to come and do that. Initially, when I made the decision to—I was fed up with how that system was working—if I’m going to be doing this, I want to be able to know that one, I’ll be able to make money from this, but also to pay the people that work with me. It came to the point where I said I was going to stop doing this, or I’m going to take a chance with this [new format]. I really feel like—and I don’t want to say blazing a trail, it’s a different approach—and we shopped around a little bit, and in trying to find the best platform, it was Podbean.
My original idea was I wanted to make this very inexpensive; I wanted to do $1 a month. But then I found out once you go on the premium side, you still have a big chunk of that with the people that have you on their platform. They get a piece, everybody gets a piece of that advertising money and it’s the same on the premium sites. They take it from revenue and they have charges for credit card transactions and they take a percentage for their fee. So, when you do that, there’s not much left. After going through all of the numbers, we came up with $1.99; that’s four podcasts a month, pretty much fifty cents an episode. People that buy a Starbucks coffee, [it’s] $3-4, so I didn’t think this would be too much. That kind of the way we started, and one thing I love about this format too—I liked to give away stuff before, but now the more successful we get, I’m going to start giving away more and more material, and even moreso now, there’s interactions with our subscribers. You have to imagine that when you switch to a format like that you are basically starting from scratch, so the numbers are not great, but it’s giving me an opportunity; I’ve pretty much in one way or another contacted every single person that has subscribed to ‘Prime Time with Sean Mooney.’ I’ve done some Facebook Live [videos] and I’ve given away some pictures, and I’ve given away some Coliseum Videos that I have from my collection that I’ve had for years and years. I gave those away and I’ve also made phone calls to people that have come on. It’s really been a great new adventure, and I don’t know where it’s going to take me, but I’m excited about it.
I hope people give us a listen, all you have to do is go to PrimetimeMooney.com, and it’s all right there. There’s a lot of stuff you can listen to; we’ve got sneak peeks, there’s episodes on the premium side. All you do is it’s a couple of clicks and you’re a subscriber and it’s $1.99. I hope that people come along, especially now because it’s a great time. My mission in New Orleans next week is to get a ton of material. I’ve got my recorders, I got my camera, I’ll be doing some Facebook Live from there to capture the whole experience for everybody. There’s going to be a lot of bonus material that people will be able to listen to with Prime Time with Sean Mooney on the premium side.
Who does he hope to have on the show in the future, and what sets his show apart from others?
I believe the show is different, not just from my own experience with WWE—being from that world and coming from outside of wrestling and basically being accepted into it, learning about it and falling in love with it—but I also have a different take. I’ve been a producer and a talent my entire career, and one thing I’ve always loved is interviewing people. I feel like I bring a different take to every interview that I do because I really feel like I can tell what people want to hear about. When I hear people talk, I listen, and a lot of times they’ll say something that other people would let go by. I just did an interview with B. Brian Blair and he talks about one of the fights he had in his career, and he kind of just passed by it. I was like ‘wait a minute, back up’ because there’s another story in there. We ended up talking about Paul Orndorff biting the ear off of Tony Atlas; they were riding between cities and Tony pushed him to the limits, so Paul Orndorff called him on it. That story would have went away, but I said ‘you mentioned it, now you have to talk about it.’ That’s just one of the gems that he delivered in that interview.
Some of the guests I’d love to get —Tony Schiavone, I’ll be speaking with him tomorrow for an upcoming episode. He’s going to be a tremendous guest, between our own relationship that we had, to everything else that’s going on and what he’s doing with his own podcast. Everyone knows how near and dear Lord Alfred Hayes is to me—I think it’s a travesty that he’s not inducted into the [WWE] Hall of Fame—one of these shows that I want to do, and I want to do the same thing with Gorilla Monsoon, is find these people that were really close to them in life and get their take. A lot of other times with Superstars you’ll hear ‘tell me about Lord Alfred Hayes’ or whomever, but what about the people that were in their lives everyday? I’m trying to track down Alfred’s two children who were in Texas, just for example, and to get them to talk about what it was like growing up with someone who was on the road all of the time. What were those moments like when they did get to see their Dad?
I’d like to bring in someone else like Sgt. Slaughter who knew Alfred when they were on the road in those territories down in Texas and those areas after he’d come to the United States to see what that experience was like. I want to take these shows—and I call them conversations, not interviews—and try and find something that no one else has really tapped into. The list is very long as far as the people that I want to get, and it really just depends on—I want these big names to be a part of the podcast, and of course they all have great stories— there are people like Kerwin Silfies, who is the director for WWE that I have lined up to be speaking to soon. He’s the guy in the truck that’s been there since the early ’80s, and has evolved with them and continued on. Howard Finkel is definitely one that I want to get.
Sean comments on the format of his show and taking a more conversational approach instead of just a normal ‘Q&A’:
My feeling is it could just be a podcast about these people’s lives; let’s say they were football players; it could be about that. When you hear about these people’s lives, that to me is what is incredibly interesting. By this time, if you were a fan of the ‘80s and ‘90s, you know how the business works, you’ve heard about road stories, you’ve heard what it’s like to be in the ring. Kayfabe’s been over for a long time, but I think what brings people to my podcast is they learn about these people’s lives. You look at a lot of them, a vast majority, it didn’t come easy. A classic example is the Danny Davis episode. Danny was a street kid; I didn’t know this when I started talking to him. I knew he came from tough beginnings, but by 13 years old he was a street fighter. It’s how he made his living, bare knuckles in the streets of Brockton, Massachusetts.
When you look at that, and they had nowhere else to go but up, so you talk to that guy—this guy appreciated it every single step of the way—and he didn’t just get into the world of professional wrestling and make a living. He didn’t just get a job with the WWF (at the time) putting up rings, he then became a referee, and not only a referee, but became a personality as a referee. He became a heel referee, then he became an enhancement talent, then he became a Superstar; that’s an unbelievable story! There’s so many of them. It’s been fascinating to me and I am just as entertained; I’m not sitting there just going down a list of questions. It’s as much fun for me doing the interviews as it is for people listening to them.
Mooney comments on speaking with former WWE composer Jim Johnston on a recent episode of his show:
[Jim Johnston] is a fascinating guy. I knew him briefly back when I was working, and I’ve talked to him several times since we’ve connected. If you listen to that episode—it made me realize how different people who have this genius, and he is—he talked about when he was a kid, he’d listen to a piece of music and immediately play it back. You’re like ‘wow, that’s incredible!’ and he’s like ‘I know this sounds weird, but to me that’s like breathing.’ It’s a gift, and he’s so humble about it. You think about all of the things that he did, and all of the music that he created, and he doesn’t feel like it’s any great accomplishment. If you talk to him, you’ll really believe that, and it’s not that he couldn’t care less, it’s just him not realizing it. He was never a wrestling fan, and he never really followed it. I don’t know if that was better for him because he wasn’t, where he wasn’t that involved in the product where he could look at somebody and see how he talks and create this piece of music for him.
People listen to these theme songs, and it brings back such tremendous memories, and I think he’s just beginning to understand this. After we had that conversation and after he lfet [WWE], it wasn’t long before he realized that because he’s heard from so many people, and he’s kind of like ‘what’s the big fuss?’ but that’s just amazing to me. I talked to him the other day and he’s like ‘I’m just deciding what’s next’ but he really is an amazing guy, I enjoyed that episode very much. I was just fascinated listening to him. He had his guitar with him, and he would just play some of the theme songs and talked about how he came up with it. That’s the kind of guests that I love. It’s a different take that you think ‘why would I want to listen to this person?’ and then when you listen you’re like ‘wow, this is awesome.’
