MADE

A friend forwarded me this excellent article in the LA Weekly about the decline of the A&R Rep. It’s a somewhat nostalgic piece for me because I tried my hand at the music business several years ago with some friends. In the process, we got to meet quite a few A&R people.

They were all nice guys, but hard to work with because they seemed to all have a disease where they couldn’t make up their minds. At the time, we were running a small indie label and trying to secure a distribution deal through a major label. We had signed this really talented young rapper out of DC to our label and were shopping him around to these labels. They all loved him. We used each meeting as leverage to secure the next bigger meeting. We basically named-dropped and managed to get into all the major labels. Granted, nobody would have invited us at all were it not for the quality of our music producer— a college buddy of mine.

So after a while we got to know these A&R guys pretty well and I started forming strong opinions about them and the profession. At first, I thought they were all incompetent. One day, they’d say you’re the greatest thing in the world and the next, they’d do a complete 180. One of the worst was the guy at Virgin, out in LA. He was Jermaine Dupris’ underboss. He practically told us we had a deal. Then he disappeared.

It wasn’t until I started reading a lot about technology and the Web and what it was doing to the industry that I started to understand what made these A&R guys so shaky. They were constantly under tremendous pressure to deliver. Their jobs were perpetually on the line. Every single A&R Rep we knew eventually got fired, laid off or reassigned. I have no doubt that some of these guys were incompetent. But others were just stuck in a cool job at the wrong time in history.

We visited a lot of labels. Not just the major ones. The A&R position was one of the few that I respected because it’s got a vaunted history and it’s one of those jobs that can be directly measured against the market. Therefore, it’s always required a bit of talent and lots of persistence to be good at. If your acts don’t sell records, you’re out. It can’t get any simpler than that.

One of the things that always struck me when we walked into these labels was the air of stagnation about them. They all seemed like buildings full of people who did things that didn’t have much direct impact on anything of great importance. In other words, most of the people there’s jobs couldn’t be easily measured and evaluated against the market. I remember one meeting with a senior A&R Rep at J Records, Clive Davis’ label. The place looked like a Revlon photo shoot. It was opulent. I just remember all these impeccably dressed beautiful young women walking around. None of them looked like they needed to be there. Flat panel TVs with music videos adorned the walls. Everyone wore trendy jeans.

But it wasn’t like walking into the headquarters of, say, Google where the environment is also young and less formal, but you know that lots of very smart people are busy working on very hard problems that have a significant impact on the economy and history. Like most big old fashioned-type companies, these labels were festooned with managerial and administrative types. CD money bought them.

You combine that managerial class with a culture based largely around image and style and what you get is internal politics that makes Afghanistan look like the Obama campaign. Internal politics always places an extra buffer between the company and the market. The worst the politics, the thicker the buffer. Image-based organizations like record labels are especially prone to this because they attract the kinds of people who’s sense of self in the workplace is defined more by navigating the social hierarchy than solving difficult, abstract problems.

Everyone knows that the labels were slow to adapt to and adopt new technology. Anybody who had spent any amount of time inside a record label could have predicted they they’d get murdered by the Web, where real work happens.

One of the great things that the Web has done is that it’s shown us what real work looks like. Real work is what people do when they love it and aren’t doing it just for money. The Web, despite all its faults, shows us what people are able to do when they love what they do and when they’re unencumbered by powerful people with agendas. The bad side of the Web is often touted. But there’s also a lot of quality on it. The Web has provided millions of people with a direct channel to the market. And they’re unrestrained by the internal politics you find at large organizations. So innovations bubble up from underneath. Large, slow moving organizations marred by internal politics like record labels and newspapers can’t compete with that. That’s why the blogosphere is now more powerful than traditional news media. It’s characterized by passion. I’m a part of that. I don’t make any money off this blog. I write it only because I love to.

I think there will always be a place for the record labels. They won’t disappear. People will always want stars. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There just won’t be a place for record labels in their current form. What the Web has done is break the monopoly the labels had created in the industry and forced them to be competitive. Now they’re just an ever-decreasing part of the industry. The Web has forced them to be leaner and smaller.

The labels got rocked because they became greedy, nihilistic places. They lost their sense of purpose.

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