Billboard Extended Q&A, Part 1: Don Ienner January 14, 2009
DON IENNER
By Bill Werde, N.Y.
Don Ienner, IMO president/owner and the former Sony Music chief, recently sat down with Billboard for his first extensive, on-the-record talk in more than a decade.
Below, in the first of a two-part, extended sit-down, Ienner touches on his early days in the music business, his mentors, working with music icons like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, Napster, Eliot Spitzer, his last days at Sony and much more.
Billboard: Tell me about your earliest days in the music business—where you got your start and who your early mentors were?
Don Ienner: I got my start in 1969 and 1970 at the Capitol Records mailroom. My brother Jimmy got me a job there after I hurt myself playing football in high school, which meant that I couldn't get a scholarship. He was in a lot of bands growing up, and I was sort of the roadie and I did some hand claps and background vocals, that kind of stuff.
Clearly he was one of my early mentors, as was Herb Belkin, who actually passed a couple years ago, who was the head of A&R for Capitol at the time. I really got the hang of what was going on because I would be required to deliver materials into marketing meetings and then they’d let me stay. Terry Knight was in the building in those days - he had Grand Funk Railroad - so I would do a lot of work for him and I’d get to listen to music before it was ready to be released. I’d have to bring the hottest records to Scott Muni at WNEW or to Rick Sklar at WABC, so I did whatever had to be done. I was young and eager and I would’ve done anything anybody asked me to do. It was really exciting. During that particular period my brother was producing Lighthouse and a few other bands. I left and went with him as his company started to thrive.
At this time were you in New York?
I was in New York. Capitol was at 1370 Avenue of the Americas so I started there, and there was a point when the head of Angel, which was the classical division of Capitol, asked me to defrost the refrigerator. That, sort of, was my last straw. I called my brother and said ‘It’s time. I need to get out of here.’
And then you went to work with your brother?
It was 1971, I went to work for him and at that particular time it was CAM-USA and we had a publishing, production and soon-to-be management company. And from 1971 through 1977 we had worked with, in one capacity or another, Grand Funk Railroad, The Raspberries, Eric Carmen, The Bay City Rollers, Blood Sweat and Tears, The Chambers Bros., and continued to work with Lighthouse. Jimmy would produce the records, and I would mix a lot of the singles or master the singles, edit the singles and I would find songs to record from publishers and writers.
How did you have an ear or a technical ability for mixing and mastering at that point?
I learned because, in those days, you could use trial and error because everything was so cheap.
Who taught you?
Shelly Yakus, my brother, Dennis Ferante, Greg Calbi, George Marino, Vinnie Otto. We mostly lived our life at the Record Plant. They were very generous with their time for me. They seemed to have seen something - that I caught on pretty quickly - but then my brother would just challenge me to do things because we had no other choice. If we were going to do a Three Dog Night record we needed to find 20 songs to pick the 10 or 12 to record, because they didn’t write. With The Bay City Rollers I suggested that we do "I Only Wanna Be With You,” which became a number one hit. All of the Raspberries stuff. I was sort of their road manager in the beginning and I went all around the world with them in 1972 when "Go All The Way" was breaking—that was, unfortunately, 37 years ago. So, I learned an awful lot from the recording level, all the way through the marketing, all the way through the touring and it was quite interesting.
In 1973 or 1974 we did a Blood Sweat and Tears record where I got to spend some time and meet with Clive Davis who was then the head of Columbia. We struck up a really good relationship that lasted for 30 something years and still to this day is strong.
What was Clive like back in those days?
Just as intense as he is now. And cared about the music, the singles, the mixes, the edits, the same that I’m sure he does now.
He was very hands on?
Very hands on. An interesting story, after the Raspberries broke up we signed Eric Carmen to Arista in 1974 and we recorded the album. He and I worked diligently on it. My brother was producing it. The first single was going to be “All By Myself,” which is a six minute epic and we had to come up with an edit. So Clive was taking his turns doing edits and I was taking turns doing the edits and my brother was taking turns doing the edits - because in those days there was a radio man named Paul Drew. He was one of the most powerful radio guys in the country at the time, and he sent out this edict that we had to have single under three minutes - and finally we came up with the right edit. It became a number one single, which I was released in October of 1975, so we really became close then. Right after that he called me and asked me to see if Jimmy would produce the Bay City Rollers follow up to the "Saturday Night" album, which we did. Again I’m compiling songs from publishers.
He was the president of Columbia at that time?
No, Clive left and went to Arista. He went to Arista in 1974. We signed Eric Carmen there. I saw a band in Cleveland do “I Only Want To Be With You” and I thought what a great cover that would be, a Dusty Springfield song. I played it for my brother - he loved it, the band loved it - and it became a huge hit at Arista. So, I really was working very closely with Clive at the time.
And then, because Jimmy and I had so much success as producers, publishers, and finding songs for other people, we decided to start a record company - myself and my brother and Irv Beagle. Irv came in to be our operations guy. We went to Neil Bogart at Casablanca Records - that was 1977 - and we started Millennium Records. Our first release was the Meco single and album, a dance version cover of the Star Wars theme. We sold a million singles and a million albums and it was a wonderful way to start off. And I was in charge of all departments and it was fun to do all of those things. We only had four or five employees but we would supplement our staff by using the Casablanca people for all the other services and I would coordinate with them.
Its funny the music business has kind of come back around to where it was.
Anybody could start a record company. So, it was great. And my brother decided to give up production. He was great at it and one of the hottest producers in the world, but he wasn’t spending any time with his three children. He was able to jump from the creative side to the business side. So it was 1977 when we started the company and we stayed at Casablanca until 1980, it was a three-year deal. After that we went to RCA to be distributed, where we had success with Laurie Lieberman, and Frankie and the Knockouts, Don McLean, and a few other artists. This was pre-CD and if you want to talk about a depressed business, this ’80, ‘81, it was terrible. I mean it was really bad. The economy was in the dumps, this was pre-CD, again, the whole Atari thing was exploding. There were very similar nuances of today’s world, and so we ended up having to shut down Millennium, at the time…
And Davis eventually hired you at Arista. Talk about the early days.
He had been after me for a while to work with him and I finally was able to make the move and went at the end of ‘82, beginning of ‘83. That was a glorious time – Clive clearly and absolutely was one of my mentors. We would enjoy many nights together listening to new music, him asking me my opinion and coming up with plans. He was very agile when it came to talking about promotion or sales or marketing or publicity. To have had that wealth [of experience] but then to have it refined by him was like Harvard.
Was there a moment in your career when you really felt like, ok I’m going to succeed at this?
You know, I always felt like I was going to be successful, because I always had been successful at different levels. Ending up running the world’s largest record company was not in my purview at the time. My idea was to service the artists, and if they had hits, then I had success as well. There were different measures of success, but I was always willing to work harder. I was always willing to put in any hour of any day to do what I had to do. I was married in 1975, and have to this day the same incredible wife who understood I had to do this in my life for many, many reasons. We were both pretty lower middle class kids and either I had to do it or it wasn’t going to happen for me. But I also loved it, and still do, with such a deep passion that I was willing to do anything to help any artist get ahead and I always sort of put myself on the back side of it. If they had success then I had success.
So, at Arista I had to go in as the head of promotion because that was the job he wanted me to do at the time, knowing that I had this vast experience at many departmental levels. But, Clive needed me to straighten out the promotion department for a brief period of time.
What great music do you remember from that time period?
In the early days of Arista, it was a bit of a struggle to say that there was great music. But we loved some of the songs and the artists we had: Billy Ocean, the Kinks, Patti Smith, the Thompson Twins. Then Whitney Houston started to come and—like Whitney Houston or not—those early records were great. We also did Aretha Franklin's comeback with "Freeway of Love."
What year did you become executive VP and GM?
I believe it was 1987. I was offered many presidencies of other companies. I was the next in line for the presidency of record companies at the particular time. I was 34 or 35 years old. And really my biggest goal was to work at Atlantic because they had Aretha Franklin and Led Zeppelin and to me that was it. That was the pinnacle of those particular genres of music. If you could excel with Aretha Franklin, and obviously many, many more, and if you could succeed with Led Zeppelin and they could coexist on the same label - that was the ultimate goal.
Who was running Atlantic at that time? Was it still Ahmet Ertegun?
Ahmet and I think Doug [Morris] might have just been there at that particular time. And Jerry Greenberg, who was fantastic and an early mentor of mine. So, I was offered a lot of jobs, and I never wanted to leave. But when Tommy [Mottola] was about to take over [Sony Music] and offered me [the opportunity] to head Columbia at 36 years old and assured me that I could do what I wanted it seemed to me that it was the place for me to take the next step in my career.
Please pardon my wavering history here, because this was a little bit before my time, but who did Tommy replace?
Tommy took over under Walter [Yetnikoff], for Al Teller. Walter was the head of the world. Tommy was the head of U.S.
And this is right at the moment when CBS becomes Sony?
Yes, that precipitated the changes. Columbia went from part of a company like CBS to a very important part of Sony. They wanted a content company to be able to be part of their portfolio. I’m sure having something to do with the whole Beta and VHS [format war] in the late 1970s fiasco that they got caught up in, which is why I’m sure they bought Columbia Pictures thereafter. But they also were very engaged in music. It was wonderful to see [then-Sony President] Mr. [Norio] Ohga watching videos, listening to music, dealing with it. Tommy built a great team.
So, Walter was the head of Sony?
Yes, and Tommy was U.S. and Bob Summer was the head of international at that time.
And Tommy hired you to do what?
Be the president of Columbia, U.S.
What other labels were there under Sony in the U.S.?
Epic. That’s all there ever was. We never purchased, we never merged, we never did anything with any other companies. We had small other labels—Def Jam was there for a while and years later 550 and the Work Group—but we never purchased a company like all these other corporations did.
Who was running Epic at the time?
Dave Glew. Dave Glew came in from Atlantic.
This is around?
This is ‘89. I went in April of 1989. I was supposed to go a year earlier, but decided to stay at Arista because I wasn’t sure how the Sony situation was going to shake out.
How was telling Clive that you were going to leave?
It was not fun [laughs]. Especially that I was going to Columbia. But I worked until the last day, and actually I took the first Milli Vanilli single, I’m sorry to say, over to MTV. I didn’t take any time off in between. Friday I left Arista, Sunday night I slept at Tommy’s apartment and we walked around my office at midnight. I had never seen it before. On Monday morning I started and there was no looking back.
Did you sleep at Tommy’s apartment because Clive knew where you lived?
[Laughs] Of course Clive knew where I lived. But, we wanted to go in together the next morning and it was sort of a fun thing to do. And those were some wonderful days. Twenty days, or whatever, after I started there was a worldwide convention in Boca Raton that I had to speak at, so it was thousands of people and it was sort of scary.
Do you remember your first difficult decision as the head of Columbia?
No, there were many, and most of it at that particular point had to do with personnel. Every time that you make a change in personnel it’s a very difficult decision. Some of the people that didn’t make the cut were people that I knew for a long time. Even some of the artists that weren’t going to move forward with us, I think those are some of the toughest decisions that you still continually have to make. It was something that I never relished, and I still don’t. It’s a very tough decision uprooting somebody, but we needed a change. Columbia wasn’t doing well - as they should have been – and they wanted change. We needed to go in there and do what we had to do and instill some energy, which was my goal, and we did. And, again, we did this never having merged with anybody, never having purchased anybody. Like Interscope ended up getting Geffen and A&M. And Island ended up with Mercury and Def Jam. That never happened with us. We never bought our market share, we grew it.
What did that look like? I mean, strategically, what were the biggest challenges and what did you have to do?
The foundation of, to me anyway, of Columbia, obviously was Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Barbara Streisand, Neil Diamond and Tony Bennett. But, we were nowhere in the alternative music area. On my first trip to the West Coast for Columbia, in May of ’89, I heard two bands and we signed them both. And we broke both those bands - Alice In Chains and Toad The Wet Sprocket - and that was a really important thing for us to do. I brought in Steve Tip, he was maybe the most important marketing and promotion executive at Warner for alternative music. We built street teams. Obviously, Tommy had signed Mariah Carey and that was a wonderful way to kick off the new Columbia, and we worked very closely on it, from a creative standpoint, from a marketing standpoint and, really, it was an incredible run.
You were there when that first record came out, "Vision of Love"?
I was the head of the company and "Vision of Love" was my pick. Not too many people wanted that song, but that was the one that I knew was the pick because it was an R&B record, and it was only her—she was the only one that could have written and sung that song. Of all the great songs on that album, this is the one that I felt would define her most, and it went on to be one of the songs of the year. Number 1 R&B record, number 1 pop record. It set up an incredible string of number 1’s for her.
What do you think of Mariah’s career trajectory at this point?
Well I’m thrilled that she had a comeback from the unpleasantries of a few years ago, with the movie ["Glitter"] and everything. It just shows her resilience and it shows she stays in touch, she stays current, she knows what she’s doing.
You’ve signed and worked with all of these great bands over the years. Do you have some sense when an act will have this sort of monolithic career, versus an act that’s going to have a few hits and maybe not a whole lot more?
There clearly and absolutely were. You need luck. Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than smart. For example, the New Kids [On The Block] were on Columbia. Before I got there they were going to be dropped, from what I heard. I just did a “Behind the Music” where they brought that up and I didn’t think that we should drop them. I wanted to get a second shot at what they were going to do because I thought they were good and I thought [producer] Maurice [Starr] was great. They were sort of robots on that first record - very, very young - but they had something to offer and I made it a priority at the company that we go after it. Obviously, the rest is history. Even as that was going on, once you had that sort of success - I called Maurice one day and said we should make a Christmas album and I think that was in August. Ten days later a Christmas album appeared at my desk and we sold like 3 million copies. So, we go from there into Mariah Carey, into lord knows whatever else was going on at the time, and all of a sudden we became the hottest record company in the world. It was gratifying.
Now this is the early 90s?
This is 1990, 1991, very quickly, signing Nas, doing the things that we were doing there. We still had Def Jam. Public Enemy was doing incredibly well. LL Cool J was going.
MC Serch brought you Nas?
Yes, he did. He’ll never let you forget it either. I love 3rd Base though too. I worked hard on 3rd Bass. So all the while even while Def Jam was there we were building our urban and hip-hop world so that was going incredibly well.
The most important thing at this point in time in terms of promotion: radio or MTV?
It was both. They were equally as powerful. They both played off each other. MTV, because the early ‘90s, was really Seattle, so your pop stuff didn’t get on as quickly. But radio and retail were very vibrant and you could do a lot of promotions at retail, as well.
When you first came in and you met with a Bruce Springsteen or a Bob Dylan, and these are guys who have already had these defining careers. When you come in and your job is to try and get the most out of Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen, that’s a fairly daunting dynamic.
Daunting, enhanced by the fact that Bob and Bruce are two of my favorite artists of my entire life and shaped my early listening. I had known [Springsteen manager] Jon Landau very well so it was a very smooth transition into the Bruce Springsteen world. I was very accepted.
Do you remember that first meeting with Bruce?
Yes. And Jon rallied me to go to Columbia. He liked me and wanted me there. Obviously, it worked very well for us, as a partnership in the Bruce Springsteen business. My wife and I and our friends had probably been to 40 shows, as fans. I was an insatiable Bruce Springsteen fanatic. "Thunder Road" was my wedding song, so this is it for me. These are not just records, this is my bible. This is something that transcended my personal life, and he made me feel so comfortable as he has over the last twenty years. We’re friends outside of Columbia, outside of my role at Sony. We’ve taken our motorcycle trips together and I’m friends with Patti and he’s friends with my wife. We worked very hard on a lot of music together. I guess the culmination is when he called me up onstage at Shea Stadium at the end of the Rising tour to sing "Twist & Shout."
So, I was a little afraid, but it was incredible and to watch Bruce’s work ethic and Jon’s work ethic, how they just work through an album. When you see the amount of pride and thoughtfulness and intelligence that goes into a Bruce Springsteen record and the seriousness with which he writes and contemplates, it’s just something for every artist to see. Over the years I’ve taken so many artists backstage to see Bruce. He has never been more gracious to these young artists that come up. Just as "Ten" was breaking for Pearl Jam, I took Eddie Vedder to a show in Jersey. Bruce sat with him for 20 minutes backstage. Eddie came out and he looked like he has just seen a ghost and said ‘I would have never been able to meet him. As a matter of fact I would have only been able to see him in the last row at the San Diego Coliseum or wherever when I was living there.’ And he ended up doing “Growing Up” the next day, at Lollapalooza in Long Island.
So, Bruce is just that influential and that strong and inspired me to do my best work every time and to never sacrifice. Something I learned from Clive is never compromise. I think that’s a better word. Never compromise. Stick to it, stick to it, stick to it, until its right. And we did that even on "the Rising," where "Into the Fire" was going to be the first single and over the weekend I had this epiphany where I must have listened 30 times to "the Rising" as an A/B to "Into The Fire." "Into The Fire" is an incredible song, but "The Rising" to me was the centerpiece of that album. It was going to be "The Rising" tour, "The Rising" album, so I call Jon and said I just listened 10 times, 20 times to each of them, you've got to talk to Bruce. We’ve got to think about making “The Rising” the song. And Bruce ended up agreeing. It sort of made everyone understand that this was a rock-based album. This is a Bruce Springsteen rock album. And “Into The Fire” was a little bit more introspective and this sort of really drove it home. And I had the pleasure of helping. I had the pleasure of working with Bob Dylan on “Time Out of Mind.”
Tell me about your first meeting with Bob?
Bob was very stand-offish in the beginning. He was being very Bob. This was during the “Oh Mercy” era, one of my all-time favorite Bob Dylan albums. He went through a couple management changes during the middle of that album, I know he wasn’t singing a lot of the “Oh Mercy” songs on tour, it was when he wasn’t getting great reviews live. I think people were sort of taking Bob for granted, and so it didn’t do everything that that album should have done, and we worked very hard on it.
Which album was that, do you remember?
It was the album after “Oh Mercy,” we’ll remember it. So I went to see Bob at the Beacon Theater one night and this current album at the time wasn’t doing well, so he wanted to see me backstage and as he is looking into the mirror, looking at me through the mirror, getting ready to go on stage and I’m standing behind him. He’s watching me, and I’m looking at him through the mirror and I said, ‘You know soon its your 30th anniversary of your first acoustic album on Columbia. Would you think about ever making an acoustic album again?’ - because I thought at that point he’d have to really sit there and write. So, he actually made a comment to me that I will not share with your audience. I felt like I got shot, like in the cartoons where somebody drinks water and the water comes out of all the holes [laughs].
His point was, ‘That’s just not what I want to do?’
That’s just not what I want to do.
He kind of shot at you?
Yeah, yeah, that I made a suggestion like that. But that brought us very close. He made three acoustic albums in a row after that and asked me to introduce him to the billion people that watched or listened to the 30th anniversary at Madison Square Garden. So, I wrote a bit of a speech. I stand up and I started giving the history of Bob Dylan on Columbia and I’m getting booed and now I’m scared to death that somebody’s going to throw something at me [laughs]. This is the Sinead O’Connor night and the insanity of all of that, and Bob’s 30th. So I stopped my speech in mid-sentence and introduced the next performer, one of my all time favorites, Stevie Wonder. And I got offstage as fast as I could [laughs].
I worked very hard on “Time Out of Mind” with him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to put that album out and I convinced him to put it out. There was a song called “Red River Shore,” that I loved, but for whatever particular reason he didn’t want to put it on [“Time Out of Mind”]. But, I really petitioned him and Jeff Rosen, who looks after him, to put it on the album and for whatever reason he didn’t. So we just left it. It’s his album.
So, he wins the Grammy for Album of the Year for “Time Out of Mind”—that’s the soy bomb year—and onstage he thanks me for encouraging him to put the album out, even though he left one of my favorite songs off the record [laughs]. I mean it was one of those nights, it was insane. So it was wildy, widly exciting. To see him get respected again to the degree that he should have always been was one of the pieces of my years at Columbia that I will never forget.
Do you think the turning point was “Time Out Of Mind”?
I think “Time Out Of Mind” showed an artist entering into a different phase of his life and the songwriting is as good as any songwriting he has ever done. And his own voicing and the production of those records and the subsequent ones after that were right up to “Modern Times.” And then the book and then the bootlegs and all of the other things just show this guy.
He’s really starting to explore?
He’s in his mid-sixties. I remember when I sent Bruce “Modern Times,” and I remember hearing back from him and he says, “Bob gives everybody hope that you never have to compromise in your entire life and that age has no relationship to creativity.”
Even Billy Joel. When I first got there in ‘89, the company for the most part had forgotten about Billy. I had people that worked there that told me, ‘oh Billy’s finished.’ Well when I heard “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” I knew we had a chance to bring him back to incredible prominence. I just thought it was a smash and some of the other songs on that record - and then he came out with “River of Dreams” three years after that. It’s a shame that he hasn’t written a new song since 1993, but those two albums sold millions. He got his touring base back and he’s as strong as he’s ever been.
Another gratifying artist was Tony Bennett, whom my mother loved, and when I got there he wanted off the label. His son Danny, who’s done a great job, had just taken over management and I think the last album sold 5,000 or 6,000 copies and nobody was really paying any attention to it. So I talked to Danny and I talked to Tony and my sense was we should have some sort of a concept, and it should be a body of work versus just ten individual songs—that’s very hard to market, we’re not going to get any of them on the radio, etc. So, a couple of months later, Danny and Tony came in. Tony says “I got it.” And he said “Perfectly Frank.” And I knew exactly what he meant. However I didn’t know what songs he was going to do. I thought he was going to do big band songs; he did more of the saloon songs, which was perfectly fine. But “Perfectly Frank,” we sold 600,000 or 700,000 albums on Tony Bennett and the rest is history. Danny and Tony have done an incredible job. I was very proud of that.
Is there a single thing that you're most proud of from your time at Sony?
Well, there's two different lives for me at Sony. First there was Columbia, which I ran from '89 to 2003. I was the youngest president ever, I was there the longest, and seven out of those 13 years we were the No. 1 label without a purchase, all home-grown acts.
When did the three characters MP3 cross your radar?
MP3 first crossed my radar as Napster.
I don’t know if it was a shot heard around the world moment for you or not. Do you remember the moment that someone kind of sat you down in front of Napster and you started to understand what this was going to mean? Or was it over a period of weeks or months where it kind of sunk in?
To tell you that I thought instantly that it was going to do what it was going to eventually do, I’d be lying and have revisionist history. Who would have known? I’m not John McCain, so I do send emails. Mark Ghuneim was really the first one to really tell me what was going on. He was the head of video promotion for Columbia. He runs Wiredset right now, one of the most successful marketing firms in the business. And Mark was very radical and very ahead of his time in terms of the Internet. Meanwhile as Napster was still there, we were selling millions and millions of records, we continued to for a few years.
I think the shot heard around the world for me was Kazaa. Michelle Anthony and I and [then-chief legal counsel for Sony Music] Dave Johnson, were on the board for the RIAA for Sony. And we were at RIAA meetings and the Kazaa slide came up in live time and it showed, at any one particular point, how many millions of people were on Kazaa downloading. I think that was the shot heard around the world for me. The magnitude of Napster 2.0 became 50 times a million. It was incredible.
So what do you do at that time, you’re running the largest record company in the world and you have this pulled plug in your drain. What are you doing?
Well one thing we did was Jim Guerinot—a very bright manager, we still have a great relationship—he had the Offspring. And Jim was always pushing to let it go free, let it go free, let’s think of other ways to go and the powers that be in Sony were absolutely against it. It was just the typical record company stuff trying to protect the turf. Which from their point of view I completely understood. I also understood the side of the artist trying to maneuver their way through this particular place. Lars from Metallica had taken a shot at Napster and it ended up biting him in the butt, if you remember. So artists were sort of afraid to go either way, but Jim gave away a million dollars on MTV to try and spur record sales, so we always tried to do things differently. We would give bonus tracks or we would put videos with albums. We never really tried to attack because we weren’t allowed to. I didn’t run the digital side of Columbia. I ran the creative business side of Columbia and that started to become…everybody was pointing fingers at each other at that particular point. Everybody was afraid. And to be honest the five heads of the companies in those days couldn’t agree that ‘Today is Monday and its 11:20.’ So there was no cooperation among those guys and they didn’t get together to make a decision.
If you could go back now and be emperor of the music business in 2001 or 2002 knowing what you know now, what might you have done differently in regards to the rise of file trading and P2P and the digital era in general?
That’s a great question.
Assume you could get the majors to agree.
That’s a great question, I’d have to really think about that but the fact is what precipitated even Napster was the fact that a lot of the companies were after one-hit wonders. This was post-Seattle where you were selling millions of albums and had long careers. All of a sudden it became hit single, hit single, hit single.
Why?
Well it was business pressure, as Napster was taking away some of the sales, companies were buying other companies and chasing the stock price. That model needed instant returns. The days of artist development were waning and it was about hits right now, hits right now, market share, market share.
Also, people took too much advantage of the 77 possible minutes on a CD with compression. “Born to Run” has 8 songs on it. “Rubber Soul” is 32 minutes long. What made you think that 17 songs on an album was giving somebody more quality? You weren’t. If you had five good songs on a 10 song album, you had a pretty great album. If you had five great songs on a 17, 18, 19 song album, less than a third of your songs were good or great and it felt like tremendous filler. The CD was an incredible blessing and an incredible curse.
Meanwhile the prices were still very high.
Meanwhile the prices were increasing because artist contracts were increasing. It was the day of the huge advance. Independent promotion, tour support and videos were through the roof. It wasn’t uncommon for a million or two million dollar video. I mean, just the expenses - salaries and rent was through the roof, and you’re trying to show a quick return.
If you think of labels as banks, these banks were making a lot of bad loans.
Not dissimilar to what’s going on right now with Live Nation. Some of those numbers that Live Nation are putting out there were numbers that were happening in the music business by giving artists 50, 60 million dollar advances. And that was absurd.
Bruce Springsteen signed a huge deal, I don’t know if that was before or after you left.
It was during my term.
When you look back on that now, do you feel like that specific deal was too much money?
Can I not comment on that?
Comment on the record if you can.
I think Bruce Springsteen having had his entire career on Columbia Records and signaling to the world that he’d like his career to remain at Columbia Records, until he decides not to make music any longer - I think most people really don’t know the true nature of that deal. And I think it’s a fair deal.
Tell me a little bit about the end at Sony. I know you’re probably limited by all sorts of deals as to what you can say, but to whatever extent you can comment, let’s discuss it. When you left, what was your title?
President and chairman Sony Music U.S.
So now you’re running Epic, you’re running Columbia, you’re running everything in the United States, what else does that include?
Legacy, Sony Urban, everything. That was at the beginning of Andy Lack coming in and then right after Andy Lack was the beginning of the merger.
Were you promoted to Sony level prior to or after…
No, after Andy Lack came in.
Then Andy Lack came in, you were promoted, and the merger happened.
Andy came in, I was promoted to chairman of U.S. [recorded music], and then Andy assessed the music business as he saw it and decided that we needed to merge with someone. You can see the wreckage of that particular three-year period - what's happened to the company subsequently and now Sony buying it back - and you can make your own assessment of whether or not that was a good thing.
You first meeting with Andy Lack—tell me what your initial impressions were?
I thought Andy was bright. He didn’t know much about the music business, certainly not about the music business that predated him for the last 50 years. He was trying to write the new record business. A lot of the things he said made sense, some that he said didn’t. But Andy, being who Andy is, went ahead with most of them anyway.
That’s the thing about people, you said earlier, “Don’t compromise,” but that’s only great advice if you have the right idea.
Don’t compromise yourself or your music for anything. That was a little bit different.
I’m saying it’s difficult to know when to compromise. As a professional, there’s times when I’m not going to compromise and I’m probably right and there’s times when I’m not going to compromise and maybe I’m not right.
Right. Listen, there were some things that obviously I didn’t compromise on, most of the people at the company including managers and artists didn’t want first singles that we might have wanted. One of them in particular is “Crazy In Love.” You know that’s a pretty famous story at this particular point. Look what happened, it was the right choice.
Beyonce didn’t want that as her single?
No, they wanted a different song. On the other hand, one of the things that I’m very proud of is when I took over Nashville. Nashville never reported to me up until 2003. Nashville was always a joint reporting to Tommy and besides the Dixie Chicks there really wasn’t much going on. But in the meantime the Dixie Chicks got moved up to Columbia when I was there because they didn’t want to be part of Nashville any longer. That was before the 15 words that were heard around the world. So I went and I brought in John Grady to head Nashville.
I’m sorry, ‘the 15 words?’
That they were embarrassed that George Bush is from Texas. So, I brought John Grady in from Mercury. He ended up doing the “O Brother Where Art Thou?” soundtrack. With no radio play from country radio it sold six or seven million copies, but I had already worked with John back in the Arista days, and I also had a label deal with him and T-Bone Burnett. And I love T-Bone. So, we really talked about if I was ever going to take over Nashville what to do. Well the first thing that I did was hire John. Well the first two things that John did were Miranda Lambert and Gretchen Wilson. I mean, we were on a roll.
What did you think of Eliot Spitzer going after the music industry for promotion, for payola? When he finally did, when he finally got the concessions and they were small.
I’ll start out by saying this, when I first got to Columbia I saw how pliable the charts were. So my friend Mike Shalett, who was a disc jockey at WLIR in 1974 and he would be playing my Raspberries albums over and over again, and we became friends, and one day he showed me this technology that he had called SoundScan. I thought it was really interesting. We were always hounded by managers and artists to keep a top ten album on the charts, even if it wasn’t deserving to be a top ten album. But in the U.K. an album came in at number 4, went to number 27 went back to number 6, went to 16, went to 99 and I would be looking at my colleagues in the U.K. and wonder, ‘How can they get away with it and not have to really manipulate the charts?”
Did they have a scientific method there then?
Well, they had sort of a Gallop thing, and so I would speak to the big managers and say why don’t you ever bust their chops when they lose 50 points in a week? And they said its really measured properly so it can’t be influenced. So, when Mike brought Soundscan to me, and you could talk to Mike about this, I was the first one who said ‘Yes, I would love to clean it up.’ There were old things called store reports [that informed the charts], and we would ask people to put down numbers - I mean the salespeople - and it was not right. So, I was the first one who wanted to clean up the charts. And we did.
There was still a lot of discretionary cash that were going into making that happen.
That I can’t tell you. I really don’t know that. All I know is, people were asking for chart numbers that weren’t legitimate. And I thought SoundScan could have corrected that. Obviously it did and we were the first ones that signed up. By the way, I was so far removed from what the promotion department was doing during my tenure as the head of Sony in the U.S. that if Elliot Spitzer could have cleaned it up, we had nothing to be ashamed of. We happened to be the first one called, and Andy made the decision to be the first one to testify.
Payola is sort of an interesting thing in the music business because some of it is tied into some of the more colorful stories from the earliest days of the music business.
Alan Freed and Dick Clark and all those guys. I’m sure it gets a little dicey. I think that the story Brian Ross did in the ‘80s was probably more important than anything Eliot Spitzer could have done.
What was that story?
You’ll have to go back and research it—it shut down independent promotion for years, which made all the smaller record companies more competitive. Because all the big record companies controlled it. It was ABC news, I think. Brian Ross. Very interesting. But, you know, Elliot Spitzer was as much of a bull in a china shop as anybody else. The truth and accuracy, at times, had no bearing on what he was doing. And a couple of years after you could see what happened.
I don’t think a lot of people in the music business were shedding tears over his fall from glory.
I don’t think a lot of people anywhere were.
So back to the Sony BMG merger. Clearly the merger didn’t work -- you just look at the market share numbers which steadily dipped. Conventional wisdom is that these were just two enormously distinct corporate cultures. Was that it?
I think that's very accurate. And [there was] something Mel Karmazin [CEO of Sirius XM Radio] told me right after the merger happened—he said it can't work because there's no clear leader.
So you’re saying, its like a 51/49 is better than a 50/50 in that situation?
Someone’s got to be in charge. It didn’t matter if it was 50.5 and 49.5, but according to any smart person that I ever talked to, mergers just don’t work. Somebody’s got to be in charge. Whatever you want to say, Doug Morris [Universal Music Group chief] is clearly in charge.
Were you ever optimistic about the merger in the earlier days?
I wasn’t as optimistic as I could have been because I knew the players in the game and didn’t think that the cultures would ever marry. Don’t forget I worked at Bertelsmann, when I was at Arista. These two cultures were not going to merge. And it just wasn’t something to do.
In the end, why do you feel you had to leave Sony BMG?
We were told that they have to make wholesale changes to the company and after 20 years, that was it. One day, one conversation. There were some clear signals, but it didn't necessarily mean it was going to be that.
Can you talk about any of those signals?
A few months earlier, [then-president of Sony Music Nashville] John Grady got fired under my watch without me being told.
Who did that?
I can't comment, but it was done.
Any lessons you took away from that time period?
I guess the greatest lesson of all would have been to not accept the role of some executive position and to do what I do best and that is to sign and nurture and develop artists.
Were there other signs the end was coming?
There was a confluence of insanity. We had that whole protective chip [root-kit controversy] that happened, which destroyed all of our records. We had nothing to do with it—it was a shock to [Sony Music Label Group president] Michele [Anthony] and me. So all of a sudden, our entire fourth quarter was destroyed by this. Enormous returns. We blew album after album after album.
Whose decision was that?
[Current Sony BMG president of global digital business and U.S. sales] Thomas Hesse's department.
And I’m sure you had all of these artists and managers…
Furious at us! And they knew it wasn’t from us. But still, we were in charge of our own company, or so we thought.
And the business of Sony BMG also at the same time was suffering.
Yes, it was all suffering. But whatever opportunity we had in that last quarter to bring it up, we got killed by the rootkit.
Who accepted your resignation?
[Sony BMG chairman] Rolf Schmidt-Holtz.
He called you into his office and it was just like, "This is it?" Short conversation?
Forty seconds? He and Tim Bowen were there.
And you worked out some sort of an arrangement?
I had a very protective contract.
So you were taken care of?
Yes.
And then you flew under the radar for a while.
I had a year of non-compete tied to a payment, so I needed to just chill out for a little while.
Right around that time your name started surfacing with EMI.
I was involved in the group that made the second-best bid for EMI. And I was going to run it because I believe in that catalog. I believe that for the price that we were going to get it, it was going to be a very profitable company, and I believe that we were going to be able to run it like a real music company.
Is it true that One Equity was your key financial partner?
They were the ones, yes.
And do you know – and I apologize if I haven’t done my homework – but do you know what the winning bid was versus what your bid was?
I don’t remember, but I believe it was well over a pound more. Maybe more than a pound over. We were second-best bid.
So that’s a good chunk of change.
Billions of dollars.
I’m actually kind of intrigued by what’s happened at EMI over the last year. The music business, the core music business, is obviously suffering enormously. Most major labels are really hurting. And EMI, as much as Guy Hands came out and sort of alienated a lot of people in strange ways, what they’re doing now I think is kind of interesting. I don’t know that it’ll work, but I respect them for trying something different. They’re trying to run EMI like a very modern business. What do you think of what’s going on over there as it relates to the music business as a whole? Do you think that they’re trying some smart things?
It will only look smart if they sign the right acts. And really, I hate to make it that simple, but it’s that simple.
I think, to be honest with you, just having interviewed the leadership team over there, they would agree with you.
That’s it. You know, depending on how you market, it only depends on who you sign. I don’t know if the head of Coca-Cola or the head of branding services would have done a better job or not a better job on Radiohead. I don’t know if it would apply to Chris Martin. Maybe it applies to Katy Perry. I really don’t know. It begins and ends with the signing process. [EMI’s head of A&R] Nick [Gatfield] is a very formidable A&R person, but even if you talk about the last two or three things that Nick signed at Universal, which was Mika and Amy Winehouse, those were two very successful projects. Would a branding person or a Coca-Cola person have made them bigger? I don’t know.
So the EMI thing came and went and this puts us at around what time? How disappointed were you when the EMI thing didn’t work out?
Well, I was disappointed because I had a whole team in place and we spent a good six months on it.
Can you tell me who was on that team without destroying careers?
[Laughing] There’s no career to be destroyed. Mike Dolan was ex-Viacom and Young & Rubicam, and he was going to be the CFO. Rick Dobbis was going to be the head of International. We were going to create another RED and Ken Antonelli was going to run it. Mike Shalett was going to be the head of all analytics and our entire internet section. So that was going to be a good thing, I think.
Are you still working with any Sony BMG artists?
I am, but I can't say who. I do have relationships and I do consult with certain artists. I also have a new artist that I just signed to Jive.
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