R
Rich
Guest
Special Report
Live Action
Lyor Cohen 05.07.07
If you want to sell a hip-hop star, you need a network, and I don't mean one made out of fiber-optic cables.
They say necessity is the mother of invention. It can also be one big mother.
You need two networks to sell music: one to find the artists, the other to market them. If one of the networks doesn't exist, you must invent it. In the case of rap music, a quarter of a century ago neither existed. So we built our own networks to discover artists and promote them.
Today I run the U.S. operations of one of the four remaining majors, Warner Music Group. But I didn't start out there. I got into the music business 25 years ago as a club promoter in L.A.
I booked and promoted Social Distortion, Fear, Fishbone and Circle Jerks. There was also a DJ crew called Uncle Jamm's Army, a local phenomenon who played big venues and whose incredible street marketing team built the crew its own network.
Through that job I met the pioneering hip-hop group Run-DMC, which led me to Russell Simmons' Rush Entertainment in 1982.
There I became Run-DMC's road manager. Eventually I began managing all of the Rush acts on the first national rap tours as a part of Rush Management, one of the most powerful rap and hip-hop management companies ever. And it was from there I jumped to Def Jam Records in 1988. That's the label Rick Rubin and Russell started in Rick's dorm room at NYU.
How did we find performers? Def Jam's artists and repertoire department consisted of a handful of DJs we knew and the few artists we had on the label. For example, we were fans of a show on Adelphi University's WBAU. The DJ was an enormously talented guy named Chuck D, who went on to form Public Enemy. And Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys (one of Def Jam's first acts) flipped out over a cassette he'd heard.
That tape brought us Todd Smith--a.k.a. LL Cool J. We grew quickly. Before we knew it, a tipping point was reached, and Def Jam's reputation made the label a destination. We didn't need to seek out artists anymore; they looked for us.
Half the battle. In the early 1980s there were no established avenues to promote hip-hop. Video? Are you kidding me? Tours? We were lucky to book a bar mitzvah.
We had to fall back on radio. Back then, if you didn't have radio play, you didn't sell records. It was that simple, but no station in the country would play rap music, except for one: KDAY in Los Angeles.
Other stations played rap, but KDAY was the first to play it 24/7. Once we had KDAY, we super-served them: We guaranteed they had our music first, sometimes exclusively; made sure all our artists showed them the love through live appearances. We were their concierges.
At the same time, we were catering to the DJ pools, solo urban retailers and specialty radio shows that played rap. That was our loose, ad hoc and very fragile marketing network. We knew that if we didn't strengthen it, the whole thing would go up in smoke. We had to create it ourselves.
We knew we needed a large-scale tour that would put hip-hop on an equal footing with big rock bands. So we built one. In 1984 we started the first-ever large-scale rap tour: Freshfest. You wanted to be on the Freshfest tour? No problem. But if we let you join, you had to let us manage you. Or record you. Or something you.
That tour featured Run-DMC, Kurtis Blow, the Fat Boys, Whodini and a bunch more, and it went on to be one of the highest-grossing tours of its day.
We knew we were on to something when the offers to play small gigs started rolling in. I remember when Charles Koppelman, then the chief executive of EMI (and currently chairman of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia), wanted to hire Run-DMC to play his daughter's Sweet 16 party.
Sure, so long as Charles also hired one of our new bands to open. The band was the Beastie Boys.
Time flies. It's 2007, hip-hop is mainstream, and I'm at a major.
At a big corporation things are different. Finding artists is usually done through a network of lawyers, artist managers and other insiders. They're like Washington lobbyists--they have the access to power, and they shop their artists constantly, setting up showcases and starting bidding wars between the music companies to sign their artists.
That's not to say there isn't a fantastic pool of talent and creativity involved in the A&R process--we've got some of the best in the business--but artist discovery at the big record companies has mostly evolved into a ritualized mating dance performed by a tiny number of players in a highly restricted network.
The same goes for marketing and promotion. The process has become almost standardized through a handful of channels: radio, TV, touring, retail and, beginning a few years ago, online and mobile. To promote in these channels effectively you need money and a staff of executives with significant expertise and relationships (not to mention a high tolerance for risk).
The mainstream promotional network is highly evolved and firmly established; its foundation predates the wide use of the Internet by many years.
The challenge, of course, is to not let rituals, standards and customs make the networks stale and ultimately ineffective.
During flush times, when technological advances hit the music business, it's easy to forget the importance of continually strengthening your networks and inventing new ones. Technology has transformed the industry: at first for better, then for worse and now, again, for better.
For a couple of decades the music business had an unbelievably lucrative ride, on the CD. When people upgraded their vinyl albums and cassette tapes to the new format, the labels got used to easy cash, signed more artists and hired thousands of people.
But that just increased the pressure to sell more CDs. And when your goal is to sell more records so you can support a bloated infrastructure, you need more and bigger commercial hits.
Building an organization to search out commercial hits can take its toll. With their massive presence in New York and L.A., the big labels suck up the talent around them. Some of that talent is not ready for prime time, so too many artists get chewed up and spit out in the process. The A&R guys feel compelled to sign bands that resemble junk food.
Their music goes down easily but doesn't offer any lasting satisfaction. These bands (we all know the ones I'm talking about) may sell a lot in the short run, but they burn out quickly. That's costly, because over the long run we lose the opportunity to cultivate the best audience a band can ever have: a loyal base of discerning fans who stick with an artist for decades and sell others on the music, too.
With an established artist-discovery network that is at risk of collapsing under its own weight, we need to revitalize and reinvent the system once again. There are all kinds of record labels, hundreds of them, some maybe even the Def Jams of tomorrow. Each of these small outfits is run by someone who really loves music, who's going through the same heartache we did back at Def Jam or that Uncle Jamm's Army did in L.A.
They have an artist or two generating some buzz. They are booking shows, working the DJs and creating their own network of fans and supporters from scratch. And, in the process, they are building a strong base for their artists, who are doing what artists are supposed to: honing their craft, developing a sound that is authentic, powerful and uniquely theirs. Every so often one of these little labels feeds the four big companies (Warner, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group and Universal Music Group) an artist who is really ready to soar.
In 2005, for example, Warner Music's Asylum Records signed a deal with a Houston label called Swishahouse.
The label had developed a small roster of artists with a rabidly loyal following. The first Swishahouse artist upstreamed to Warner was Mike Jones. After a steady campaign of working the formal and informal marketing networks, Mike's album--Who Is Mike Jones?--debuted at number one and went on to sell a million copies in two months.
With the online and wireless worlds rapidly replacing CDs, our challenge now is to adapt and extend established promotional networks to exploit new technologies to the fullest. Warner is ready.
And yet, the Web is also a limitation. No matter what people say about the power of sites like MySpace and YouTube, you can't absorb the essence of an artist until you see him or her perform live. And you can't determine if their following is genuine unless you experience it firsthand.
In the 1980s an interactive video channel called The Box emerged as a possible platform for hip-hop. The labels and artists' managers soon discovered they could "jack" The Box--hype results by having a group of people phoning in to order the video plays. Today we're seeing similar distortions on some social networking sites. That's another reason that live performances tell you something. Live doesn't lie.
Ahmet Ertegun, the inimitable music magnate who passed away last year, left me with a telling memory. Once an A&R executive was bending his ear about a hot new band. Finally Ahmet asked him a single question, which embarrassed the man into silence: "Have you seen the band live?"
Ahmet knew that finding good music is about going out, making contact with people and listening. It's about going to a dive, getting your shoes stepped on, drinks spilled on you, jostling for a view and loving it.
That's all part of the live experience, and there's no substitute for it--not just for the audience, but for the musicians, whose creativity fuels the industry.
As much as technology transforms the world, as powerful as all these peer-to-peer or social networks are becoming, the most important network is still composed of real, live people dealing with one another face-to-face.
Showing up in person still matters. It's true in friendship. It's true in business. It's true in music. When certain people walk into a room, molecules change, energy shifts--and things start to happen.
Lyor Cohen is chief executive of U.S. Recorded Music for Warner Music Group
Live Action
Lyor Cohen 05.07.07
If you want to sell a hip-hop star, you need a network, and I don't mean one made out of fiber-optic cables.
They say necessity is the mother of invention. It can also be one big mother.
You need two networks to sell music: one to find the artists, the other to market them. If one of the networks doesn't exist, you must invent it. In the case of rap music, a quarter of a century ago neither existed. So we built our own networks to discover artists and promote them.
Today I run the U.S. operations of one of the four remaining majors, Warner Music Group. But I didn't start out there. I got into the music business 25 years ago as a club promoter in L.A.
I booked and promoted Social Distortion, Fear, Fishbone and Circle Jerks. There was also a DJ crew called Uncle Jamm's Army, a local phenomenon who played big venues and whose incredible street marketing team built the crew its own network.
Through that job I met the pioneering hip-hop group Run-DMC, which led me to Russell Simmons' Rush Entertainment in 1982.
There I became Run-DMC's road manager. Eventually I began managing all of the Rush acts on the first national rap tours as a part of Rush Management, one of the most powerful rap and hip-hop management companies ever. And it was from there I jumped to Def Jam Records in 1988. That's the label Rick Rubin and Russell started in Rick's dorm room at NYU.
How did we find performers? Def Jam's artists and repertoire department consisted of a handful of DJs we knew and the few artists we had on the label. For example, we were fans of a show on Adelphi University's WBAU. The DJ was an enormously talented guy named Chuck D, who went on to form Public Enemy. And Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys (one of Def Jam's first acts) flipped out over a cassette he'd heard.
That tape brought us Todd Smith--a.k.a. LL Cool J. We grew quickly. Before we knew it, a tipping point was reached, and Def Jam's reputation made the label a destination. We didn't need to seek out artists anymore; they looked for us.
Half the battle. In the early 1980s there were no established avenues to promote hip-hop. Video? Are you kidding me? Tours? We were lucky to book a bar mitzvah.
We had to fall back on radio. Back then, if you didn't have radio play, you didn't sell records. It was that simple, but no station in the country would play rap music, except for one: KDAY in Los Angeles.
Other stations played rap, but KDAY was the first to play it 24/7. Once we had KDAY, we super-served them: We guaranteed they had our music first, sometimes exclusively; made sure all our artists showed them the love through live appearances. We were their concierges.
At the same time, we were catering to the DJ pools, solo urban retailers and specialty radio shows that played rap. That was our loose, ad hoc and very fragile marketing network. We knew that if we didn't strengthen it, the whole thing would go up in smoke. We had to create it ourselves.
We knew we needed a large-scale tour that would put hip-hop on an equal footing with big rock bands. So we built one. In 1984 we started the first-ever large-scale rap tour: Freshfest. You wanted to be on the Freshfest tour? No problem. But if we let you join, you had to let us manage you. Or record you. Or something you.
That tour featured Run-DMC, Kurtis Blow, the Fat Boys, Whodini and a bunch more, and it went on to be one of the highest-grossing tours of its day.
We knew we were on to something when the offers to play small gigs started rolling in. I remember when Charles Koppelman, then the chief executive of EMI (and currently chairman of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia), wanted to hire Run-DMC to play his daughter's Sweet 16 party.
Sure, so long as Charles also hired one of our new bands to open. The band was the Beastie Boys.
Time flies. It's 2007, hip-hop is mainstream, and I'm at a major.
At a big corporation things are different. Finding artists is usually done through a network of lawyers, artist managers and other insiders. They're like Washington lobbyists--they have the access to power, and they shop their artists constantly, setting up showcases and starting bidding wars between the music companies to sign their artists.
That's not to say there isn't a fantastic pool of talent and creativity involved in the A&R process--we've got some of the best in the business--but artist discovery at the big record companies has mostly evolved into a ritualized mating dance performed by a tiny number of players in a highly restricted network.
The same goes for marketing and promotion. The process has become almost standardized through a handful of channels: radio, TV, touring, retail and, beginning a few years ago, online and mobile. To promote in these channels effectively you need money and a staff of executives with significant expertise and relationships (not to mention a high tolerance for risk).
The mainstream promotional network is highly evolved and firmly established; its foundation predates the wide use of the Internet by many years.
The challenge, of course, is to not let rituals, standards and customs make the networks stale and ultimately ineffective.
During flush times, when technological advances hit the music business, it's easy to forget the importance of continually strengthening your networks and inventing new ones. Technology has transformed the industry: at first for better, then for worse and now, again, for better.
For a couple of decades the music business had an unbelievably lucrative ride, on the CD. When people upgraded their vinyl albums and cassette tapes to the new format, the labels got used to easy cash, signed more artists and hired thousands of people.
But that just increased the pressure to sell more CDs. And when your goal is to sell more records so you can support a bloated infrastructure, you need more and bigger commercial hits.
Building an organization to search out commercial hits can take its toll. With their massive presence in New York and L.A., the big labels suck up the talent around them. Some of that talent is not ready for prime time, so too many artists get chewed up and spit out in the process. The A&R guys feel compelled to sign bands that resemble junk food.
Their music goes down easily but doesn't offer any lasting satisfaction. These bands (we all know the ones I'm talking about) may sell a lot in the short run, but they burn out quickly. That's costly, because over the long run we lose the opportunity to cultivate the best audience a band can ever have: a loyal base of discerning fans who stick with an artist for decades and sell others on the music, too.
With an established artist-discovery network that is at risk of collapsing under its own weight, we need to revitalize and reinvent the system once again. There are all kinds of record labels, hundreds of them, some maybe even the Def Jams of tomorrow. Each of these small outfits is run by someone who really loves music, who's going through the same heartache we did back at Def Jam or that Uncle Jamm's Army did in L.A.
They have an artist or two generating some buzz. They are booking shows, working the DJs and creating their own network of fans and supporters from scratch. And, in the process, they are building a strong base for their artists, who are doing what artists are supposed to: honing their craft, developing a sound that is authentic, powerful and uniquely theirs. Every so often one of these little labels feeds the four big companies (Warner, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group and Universal Music Group) an artist who is really ready to soar.
In 2005, for example, Warner Music's Asylum Records signed a deal with a Houston label called Swishahouse.
The label had developed a small roster of artists with a rabidly loyal following. The first Swishahouse artist upstreamed to Warner was Mike Jones. After a steady campaign of working the formal and informal marketing networks, Mike's album--Who Is Mike Jones?--debuted at number one and went on to sell a million copies in two months.
With the online and wireless worlds rapidly replacing CDs, our challenge now is to adapt and extend established promotional networks to exploit new technologies to the fullest. Warner is ready.
And yet, the Web is also a limitation. No matter what people say about the power of sites like MySpace and YouTube, you can't absorb the essence of an artist until you see him or her perform live. And you can't determine if their following is genuine unless you experience it firsthand.
In the 1980s an interactive video channel called The Box emerged as a possible platform for hip-hop. The labels and artists' managers soon discovered they could "jack" The Box--hype results by having a group of people phoning in to order the video plays. Today we're seeing similar distortions on some social networking sites. That's another reason that live performances tell you something. Live doesn't lie.
Ahmet Ertegun, the inimitable music magnate who passed away last year, left me with a telling memory. Once an A&R executive was bending his ear about a hot new band. Finally Ahmet asked him a single question, which embarrassed the man into silence: "Have you seen the band live?"
Ahmet knew that finding good music is about going out, making contact with people and listening. It's about going to a dive, getting your shoes stepped on, drinks spilled on you, jostling for a view and loving it.
That's all part of the live experience, and there's no substitute for it--not just for the audience, but for the musicians, whose creativity fuels the industry.
As much as technology transforms the world, as powerful as all these peer-to-peer or social networks are becoming, the most important network is still composed of real, live people dealing with one another face-to-face.
Showing up in person still matters. It's true in friendship. It's true in business. It's true in music. When certain people walk into a room, molecules change, energy shifts--and things start to happen.
Lyor Cohen is chief executive of U.S. Recorded Music for Warner Music Group
