As the number of record companies shrinks down to the Big Four, the number of records sold by acts discovered on the street and grown by savvy execs dwindles as well.
Message to music biz: Don't bother nurturing artists when you can manufacture acts.
The boom is on for photogenic boy bands like 'N Sync (2.4 million units in one week). This follows breakout hits by Ricky Martin, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
The movie biz correlative of this trend is the summer blockbuster mentality: Rack up huge numbers on the backs of star-driven crowd-pleasers. In both music and movies, not to mention TV, corporate bigness seems to be pushing quality and creativity to back seats on the biz bus.
Harvey Leeds, senior veep of artist development at Epic Records, offers an explanation, albeit a grim one, for the abundance of heartthrob boy toys and teen sugarpop thrushes who have supplanted the personal songwriting and musicianship of rock's halcyon days.
"The days of developing a band are gone," says Leeds. "They're manufactured, not developed on the street. Instead of, 'There's a new band that's huge in Gainesville, we'd better pay attention,' today they're created in a laboratory."
"Nothing sticks" isn't the title of a new hit song, but it's a common refrain in the offices of music A&R pros from L.A. to Nashville to New York. It helps explain the artist development dilemma that Leeds describes.
It's a sad tune that means Hootie & the Blowfish can move 16 million units of "Cracked Rear View," then dip to 3 million on their next release. Likewise, Alanis Morissette can rack up 16 million copies of "Jagged Little Pill" and move just 3 million on her next release.
Music execs point fingers at myriad suspects accused of sending "artist development" --- where never-heard-ofs were carefully and methodically nurtured into platinum-shippers and arena-fillers --- into the bargain bins of history.
And nearly everyone has an opinion on how to get the rock rolling again.
"The payoff is enormous when you do it through old-fashioned marketing," says Leeds. "As a 25-year veteran, I can say that it took Meat Loaf a year to Living Colour took eight months, the Clash's 'London Calling' took a long time, too. Pearl Jam's first album took five (to) six months."
Street & specialty
The "old-fashioned" approach credited by Leeds is "street and specialty marketing." He points to current examples that bolster his belief that you can't ignore the basics.
"Incubus has taken three years, and they're just about to blow up," says Leeds, "and Dope has SoundScanned 80,000 units."
There's one big problem facing "old-fashioned marketing," however.
"The record company should be prepared to show faith and commitment to the acts beyond more than one album if it doesn't hit," Ray Cooper, co-prexy/CEO for Virgin, says. "That's easy to say, but the cost of doing business, especially the cost of videos, is going up."
How much? And how much is the cost of breaking acts killing the "art" part of artists and repertoire?
"We live in a next-quarter world. How can we justify cumulative spending to that world?" asks one top exec, who decries the current mega-corporatization of music for other reasons, again focusing on the financial realities of music in the new millennium.
"At one time, you could sign a band for $ 100,000," he says, "but now you're looking at $ 1 million to break them."
"Breaking" an act can be loosely defined as maximizing sales within the artist's potential marketplace.
For a debut artist that didn't require a lot of money to sign or market, this could be as low as 250,000 units, though the current benchmark is about 500,000.
For an artist with tremendous mainstream or crossover appeal, it could be a million units.
Listening to the chorus of current top-ranking music biz pros, it's clear that there's a brave new world in artist development, but also there are traditional rules of the rock road that can't be ignored.
First, everyone agrees, you have to break through the unrelenting din of cultural options in the new millennium.
One of the new world factors most often cited, the Internet, is either cyber-savior or great online Satan, depending on who's talking.
Ron Shapiro, exec VP/G.M. of Atlantic Records, sees it as a little of both, noting that "kids growing up have 200 channels; sometimes, with satellite, 500 channels. They have Nintendo and PlayStation. They have videos and all kinds of computer games and access to the Internet, and they do probably about 14
activities. So you've got to try to have the same impact that you had in the '50s, '60s, '70 and '80s with one network TV show and one radio station."
Shapiro says that's not impossible, just dependent upon a different model, or modem, as it were.
"To have the most impactful artist," says Shapiro, "that means having as many 'hits' as you can have. By that I mean everywhere the audience turns you want to try and be. If they're playing on the computer, you want to be artist of the month on AOL."
Omnipresence
Jay Boberg, president of MCA Records, concurs on the need for omnipresence as a means of defying clutter. He places increasing emphasis on "brand resonance marketing."
Boberg says one example of MCA's tack on this front is the tie-in between R&B star Mary J. Blige and MAC cosmetics.
Where this is different --- say from Jovan perfume and the Rolling Stones tour of decades ago --- is that this "isn't just pure sponsorship, but using lifestyle accouterments and associations with those accouterments as an exposure vehicle to approach consumers who are living that lifestyle to attach your artists to that."
But this approach isn't without risks. Says Boberg, "Direct-to-consumer marketing has to ring true to the audience and the artist."
For Atlantic, says Shapiro, that means "partnerships with Seventeen, Bride, People, Teen People, GQ. We did an exclusive deal with Wilhemina modeling agency to bridge appropriate artists into the fashion and advertising world. We did a deal with the Continental Basketball Assn. to exclusively play Atlantic music in
their venues across the country.
"Then there's countless people, from Steve Madden shoes to Calvin Klein to Tommy Hilfiger, with whom we've done direct deals with, to launch artists' projects and artists' charities as well as help gain awareness of our talent."
If there's a window of opportunity presented by the proliferation of new media and new marketing alliances, the pros agree that there's no substitute for the old values.
"The big companies need to leave the label chiefs alone," says one exec. "How else do you have the success stories like David Geffen, Chris Blackwell and Herb Alpert & Jerry Moss?"
Outside of Clive Davis --- whose autonomy is legendary and lucrative --- and Ted Field's Interscope team, even relatively unfettered label chiefs are hard to find. It's no coincidence that Danny Goldberg and Chris Blackwell are now heading their own indie outfits.
But the better question might be: Who'd want the label chief gig?
According to Cooper, "The investment that you put in an artist's second album can be deemed a failure even if its a multimillion-selling record."
All of the moguls cited above built their careers for the most part on the singer-songwriters and bands led by same. Alternative rock was once one of the most fertile grounds for growing stars with lasting impact, the place where R.E.M. and U2 were spawned.
Unfortunately, alternative music hits usually peak at around 1.3 million units --- not enough to stave off the hungry next-quarter corporate profit beasts.
Says Cooper, "In alternative, you're looking at seed money and not checking SoundScan until you're on your second or third album."
Again, in the "next quarter" world, easier said than done. One of the most emblematic casualties of the bottom-line mentality is singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, who bounced from label to label over the decades --- always loved by a few, but never heavily marketed to a mass audience.
Now ironically, she's gotten reams of publicity from an Oscar-nominated song for New Line's pic "Magnolia" and a Reprise soundtrack album from same moving almost 230,000 units. There's clearly an audience for her music, but perhaps the numbers don't get conglomerate chiefs' hearts racing when 'N Sync can ship an estimated 1.1 million in one day.
Leeds says, "Aimee Mann was an unfortunate situation with a misunderstood artist," but sees the glass as half-full for other talented tunesmiths. "Everyone's looking in the window at Macy Gray," says Leeds, while acknowledging "it's really hard for singer-songwriters in the year 2000."
The "window" on Gray shows a distinctive artist currently in the Top 10 and moving 100,000-plus units a week. No wonder she's raising the hopes of execs not content to work the boy band "laboratory."
What hasn't changed, says Shapiro, and "the thing from the past that we have to hold onto, in particularly marketing rock bands," is that "you gotta hang on and be in it for the long haul if you think you have the goods.
"We have all kinds of bands. Sugar Ray made rock music and sold 30,000 records with the first record, and then the second went platinum, and then the third has gone triple platinum. We worked Jewel for two years before she came a superstar."
Cooper agrees that there's still room for the fundamentals --- as long as you adjust for the changes in the wired world of entertainment: "You have to really focus on making sure that the records are great 'cause you can't say well, we'll get it right on the next record," adding that budgetary thinking has to be a consideration.
"You have to be selective --- what will make a difference for this record? If it's radio, then you make your bed and lie in it. If it's not, then you use press and the Internet, and you build --- and spread out your money over a longer period of time, maybe 10-18 months --- to build an audience."
Leeds also points out the rules of the road are still the same: stay on the road. "Korn's first record didn't go gold and the second record didn't go gold, but as a touring entity they couldn't be denied," says Leeds, offering the following sequence that's music to every exec's ears. "The Family Values tour broke Korn and Limp Bizkit. When Korn broke, it pulled their catalog along."
But like everything in the biz, the road has not remained the same.
Boberg says, "The big difference between then and now in terms of a live performance medium is that club business is down. The drinking age has been raised from 18 to 21 in a lot of states, so it's not the same as it was 15-20 years ago."
And it's just harder to break bands from live performances. It can happen, but Blink 182 probably did 250 live shows before radio came to the party."
Shapiro emphasizes the importance of keeping your eyes on the artistic prize at the heart of the music enterprise.
He cites Jewel, one of the most successful singer-songwriters of the '90s as an example.
"Jewel paved the way for the launch of the Lillith Fair era. She and Joan Osborne were the first women who got on Alternative radio after a decade of essentially grunge and male-dominated things and she had four massive hits in a row over two albums and sold 20 million albums and captured that moment.
"... I think we have to be a little mellower in the way we look at this and expect ups and downs because of the kind of culture and the new world that we live in, but hang tough with the people that have real talent and something to say."
Contact the Variety newsroom at
news@variety.com