Record company exec Danny Goldberg says ‘nothing can be done in the short term’ to rebuild industry profits
August 4, 2009 at 6:36 am by Mitch Perry
By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.
With the recording industry in freefall, the manager of one of the most respected bands in rock announced last month a new sort of record label, perhaps more akin to a venture capital company.
Brian Message represents Radiohead. But now with Polyphonic, a new company he’s helping to create, new artists will be signed and given funding but then will record their own music and choose outside contractors to handle their publicity, merchandising and touring.
According to the NY Times,
Instead of receiving an advance and then possibly reaping royalties later if they have a hit, musicians will share in all the profits from their music and touring. In another departure from tradition in the music business, they will also maintain ownership of their own copyrights and master recordings — meaning they and their heirs can keep earning money from their music.
Meanwhile, Nielsen reports that sales of physical albums fell off , while individual digital tracks rose 27 percent. That follows news from earlier this year that indicates that teenagers are not only buying fewer CD’s (nothing too radical there), but also fewer digital downloads of music, prompting a market researcher to remark, “ These declines could be happening due to a lack of excitement among teens about the music available, but it could also reflect a larger shift in the ways teens interact with music, given that so much music is now available whenever and wherever they want it.”
Intrigued, I asked one of the veterans of the music industry, Danny Goldberg, what he makes of what’s happening in the industry he’s worked in for his entire adult life. He said these developments are part and parcel of the radically different environment in the music industry.
““The record side of the business has been terribly, terribly damaged by the availability of free music on the Internet. The sales of individual tracks thru companies like iTunes in no way compensate for the loss of CD sales, so the total amount of revenues for recorded music are way less than half than 10 years ago. Thousands and thousands of jobs have been lost. Now, there are people who suggest that maybe some of those jobs should have been lost, and some of the people at record companies were egotists, and maybe didn’t do that much, but some people did do a lot. It’s like marketing in any business smart hard working people are likely to do a better job than stupid, lazy inexperienced ones…. There’s just nothing to be done about it in the short term.”
Although some cutting edge observers of the media (like Chris Anderson) conclude this to be all to the good, many others think the jury is still out on that verdict.
Goldberg adds…”It’s not just the record business, it’s also the book business, movie, newspaper business, and to a certain extent, the record business, as technology creates alternatives for people and fragments the business and some of it is not connected to people getting paid for their creative work.”
I was speaking to him upon the publication of his memoir of his 40 years in the business, Bumping into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business, just released in paperback.
Although it might be reach to call Goldberg a ‘Zelig’ of the rock music industry, he has had a glorious life in the business that continues to this date, where he currently manages Steve Earle and Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine fame) among others.
His book (which doesn’t focus much on the business of rock much at all) begins with remembrances of covering Woodstock 40 years ago for Billboard Magazine, then catapults when he begins doing public relations for a little band called Led Zeppelin back in 1973.
After Zeppelin, Goldberg also spent considerable time working over the past four decades with Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen, Warren Zevon, and Kurt Cobain.
Goldberg ended up being introduced to Nirvana by mutual friends Sonic Youth. He spends 55 pages in the paperback version of Bumping Into Geniuses writing about his experience with the band and Cobain, which he calls the most important relationship of his professional career.
He revisits those halcyon days of grunge that was 1991, and includes a reference to a cutting remark Cobain once made about Pearl Jam. It reminded me of that time when, for those who cared, you either had to be in the Nirvana or PJ camp. Kind of like the Beatles or the Stones in the 60’s, if you were around then.
Being a Nirvana partisan, I remember reading about how Cobain was upset in 1993, when Vs outsold In Utero, and Eddie Vedder made the cover of Time.
In his book, Goldberg recounts how he thought a Cobain caustic remark about Vedder was “unfortunate.” I asked him why he wrote that.
Goldberg said Cobain regretted making the remark, and that he and Eddie Vedder became good friends before Cobain died. “And they really were from the same planet artistically and spiritually and culturally, but you know, sometimes when somebody who’s similar to you can be a threat emotionally. There was competition but there was more collegiality.”
In addition to his musical adventures, Goldberg is a self described passionate liberal. In 2005, he wrote the book, How the Left Lost Teen Spirit and around the same time became the CEO of the Air America Radio Network. One of the biggest radio markets in the country that the network never penetrated has been the Tampa Bay area.
Despite proclamations from Bill O’Reilly on a seemingly annual basis, the network itself is still on the air. (Although it’s biggest stars, such as Al Franken, Randi Rhodes, Janeane Garafolo and for all intends and purposes, Rachel Maddow, have long departed). But he admits the idea of something like Air America is easier to imagine than to execute.
“It was a very ambitious notion, to try to have 24/7 programming out of nothing. (But) radio is more done program by program. Randi Rhodes did well, Rachel … but it’s hard overnight to create a culture of 24/7 liberal talkers .Liberals express their way thru print and comedy. Conservatives have focused on talk radio, but look at TV comedy. Liberals have an advantage. Different kinds of culture connect asymmetrically to different types of culture”.
The media landscape is changing before our eyes. But Danny Goldberg’s book should remind us that though rock is a(n ever changing) business, it’s also about doling out lots of pleasurable experiences along the way. Let’s hope it never dies.
