When Rob Stringer moved from London to New York to run Columbia Records in 2006, all the omens were bad. Columbia was a microcosm of the whole record industry during that bleak period: a venerable institution struggling to cope with an unprecedented collapse in revenue, prestige and morale. With an ageing roster that included only one young global superstar, Beyoncé, the label was bloated, listless and discombobulated by parent company Sony Music’s recent merger with BMG. Stringer, who had spent five years as chairman of Sony UK, had a mountain to climb.
“The first five years were brutally hard,” says Stringer, an energetic, direct 56-year-old. “Did people want me to succeed? No, not everybody, but I understand that. It’s never personal here; it’s always business.”
Over the next decade, Stringer slashed overheads in half, added marquee names such as David Bowie and Daft Punk to the roster, oversaw One Direction’s imperial phase, helped turn Pharrell Williams into a pop star and signed Adele (“a watershed moment”). In April 2017, fully vindicated, he ascended to the role of CEO of Sony Music Entertainment.
Thirty years ago, the record industry was dominated by the Big Six: Warner Music, CBS, MCA, BMG, Capitol-EMI and PolyGram. A series of mergers and acquisitions have reduced that to the Big Three, accounting for three-quarters of the global recorded music market. As of October 2016, for the first time ever, all three are headed by British executives: Stringer at Sony; Sir Lucian Grainge, 58, at Universal Music Group (UMG) and Max Lousada, 45, at Warner Music Group.
It seems more than coincidental that all three CEOs are former A&R men who have remained loyal to their respective companies. Because British labels are much smaller than their US counterparts, they are necessarily less Balkanised, more versatile and more globally minded. A successful British executive needs to understand not just A&R but sales and marketing, across every genre of music. Raised on Radio 1 and the British music press, they have naturally eclectic taste. “The skills and backgrounds of British executives have become more useful to an increasingly global music industry,” says Mark Sutherland, editor of Music Week. “Even a few years ago the American industry was very insular, because it didn’t need to be otherwise.”
For decades, the record label was the alpha and omega of an artist’s career. It paid for recording, manufacture, distribution and promotion and only had to reckon with two third parties: retail and radio. Whether they were as smooth as Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun or as terrifyingly pugnacious as CBS’s Walter Yetnikoff, the label bosses enjoyed immense power. “It was all influence and contacts,” says Stringer. “Would I have survived in that era? Probably not.”
Starting in 1982, the landmark year of MTV, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the first compact disc, the industry enjoyed almost two decades of uninterrupted growth, underpinned by the low-cost, high-ticket CD. While this bonanza fuelled some remarkable music, it also led to hysterical bidding wars, unrecoupably huge advances, grotesque waste, unreasonable pressure and ugly public legal battles with stars as big as Prince and George Michael. To sustain growth during the Nineties, the labels mercilessly exploited customers with price-fixing and forced bundling, compelling them to buy a £12 album to get one hit song. “It was screwed up,” says Stringer. “It was a false economy.”
Revenue reached an all-time high in 1999, the year that 18-year-old college dropout Shawn Fanning launched Napster, the file-sharing software that taught a generation that music could – and even should – be free. Through a combination of technological inevitability and terrible decisions, CD sales halved between 2000 and 2008 and digital stores such as iTunes couldn’t plug the gap because they unbundled songs from albums. Between 1999 and 2014, the industry lost almost 40 per cent of its revenue, even without adjusting for inflation. The massive layoffs and budget cuts that ensued hindered labels’ ability to break new artists. CNN called it “music’s lost decade”. “You were in damage-limitation mode, managing people’s expectations,” Lousada remembers. “Creativity, investment and opportunity were leaving the business.”
Now the record industry is finally bouncing back, thanks to streaming. In 2015, growth rose significantly for the first time since the late Nineties and hasn’t slowed since, but it’s too early to pop the Champagne corks. Its global revenue in 2017 stood at £13 billion, still only two-thirds of its 1999 peak. The record industry, once synonymous with the whole music industry, is now less important to artists than live music and tech companies. Humbled and chastened, it requires a different breed of CEO. “You can’t go chucking your weight around,” says Sutherland. “You’ve got be a people person to get the deals you want when you’re not necessarily the one with leverage.”
“It was a jackpot economy for 30 years and then it wasn’t,” says Stringer. “We had to reinvent ourselves and be realistic about who we were, what we did and almost why we existed. We were in charge of the music industry and so the decisions made by the record company titans ran the whole industry. We’re not in charge now.”
So who is in charge?
“Nobody.”
One day in 2006, Lucian Grainge arrived at the London offices of Universal Music for a crucial meeting. All of his key personnel were already there; Grainge was tactically late. He walked in, turned off the lights and paced the room in darkness for a few moments. “See that,” he said finally. “Better get used to it. That’s what it’s like when you don’t have any hit records.” “That’s a true story,” says David Joseph, chairman and CEO of Universal Music UK. “He got a strong message across but in a humorous way.”
Grainge had poached Joseph from RCA in 1997, when he was the newly appointed managing director of Polydor. “I was very happy and not thinking about any move whatsoever and then I met Lucian and he was – how should I put it? – rather persuasive,” Joseph remembers. “It was a good insight into his dealmaking mentality.”
For Grainge, the music industry is a family business. His father owned a record shop in North London and his older brother was a successful A&R man and label owner whose signings included Thin Lizzy and Sinéad O’Connor. In 1978, the 18-year-old Grainge walked out of his university entrance exam and became a runner for talent agency MPC. He spent most of the Eighties as an A&R on the publishing side of the music industry.
“I understand songs,” he once told the Guardian. “It’s difficult to define. I can definitely smell it. I can feel it in my fingertips.”
“At heart he’s an A&R person,” says Joseph. “He’s achieved what he has because he understands what makes creative people tick. It can be Abba and Elton, the Stones and U2, Taylor Swift and Rihanna. He can hold the attention of people who have seen label people come and go and at the same time feel incredibly comfortable with a young artist we’re just about to sign.”
“There was a time when a lot of CEOs were lawyers, but he’s a genuine music guy,” says Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, who first worked with Grainge in 1992 on Abba’s Gold compilation. “One of his bosses said to me that he is a record animal. The music industry was in his spine, I think. He was a very powerful, intense, energetic personality and you felt that he could get things done.”
In 1995, Edgar Bronfman Jr, the music-loving CEO of liquor company Seagram, bought MCA, the weakest of the majors, and asked industry veteran Doug Morris to lead it. Rebranded as Universal Music Group, the company acquired PolyGram (including Polydor and Island) and quickly overtook Warner to become the world’s biggest record company. Grainge was its star player. Among his achievements was making Amy Winehouse the first British singer in years to crack America. “The number one thing Lucian taught me was whatever happens, protect your A&R investment,” says Joseph. “When the industry was dipping, you had to cut certain areas, but he said that’s the one thing you ring-fence.”
Morris groomed Grainge as his successor for years before handing over the reins in 2011. Grainge opened his account with an extraordinary coup. EMI was the sick man of the record industry: a once-great company haemorrhaging money and talent after a disastrous four years in the hands of private-equity firm Terra Firma. The industry had long expected EMI, the fourth-largest label, to merge with Warner, the third. The prospect of a whale like UMG snapping up EMI was much less popular. Grainge had to overcome opposition from the European commission, the US senate and rival labels, and put his job on the line. After appeasing the regulators by ceding EMI’s Parlophone group of labels to Warner, he closed the deal in 2012 for £1.2bn. “I don’t think anyone thought that was going to get through but he found a way to make it happen,” says Sutherland.
Grainge’s high-stakes gambit paid off. In 2013, UMG became the first label to claim all top ten spots on the Billboard Hot 100. At the 2016 Grammy Awards, all five Album Of The Year nominees were by UMG artists and two – Sam Smith and Beck – were new signings to EMI’s revitalised Capitol imprint. “It’s pretty extraordinary,” says Joseph. “The timing of that chess move was exceptional.”
Grainge, who was knighted in 2016, has more than a trace of the Eighties alpha male. In interviews, he’s blunt and commanding, telling Billboard in 2017, “Nothing we do is ever over. And I’m never satisfied.” Doug Morris once said, “He is so deceptive, with that little kind face and those little glasses. Behind them, he is actually a killer shark.”
Describing UMG as a music-focused entertainment company rather than a record company, Grainge has moved its headquarters from New York to California to be closer to Silicon Valley. In 2014, he told his top team to “hit the reset button” and create “the music company of tomorrow”. To that end, he has made pioneering deals with Apple, Snapchat and mobile phone companies in emerging markets such as Kenya and Nigeria. He has invested in tech companies, documentaries, TV formats, stage musicals and merchandising. Irving Azoff, the superstar manager and former MCA chairman, has called him “the great hope for the music business”.
In 2013, Billboard asked Grainge to sum up his personal philosophy. “Keep going,” he replied. “Charge. Just keep going.”
When you enter the artists’ lounge at Columbia Records in New York, you’re clobbered by history in the form of framed photographs of the artists who made “Big Red” a kitemark of quality: Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Simon & Garfunkel. “This is where we bring the new artists and say, ‘Do you want to be a part of that?’” Stringer says with pride. “Adele saw pictures of Beyoncé, Barbra Streisand and Bob Dylan and said, ‘I could be here. This is going to be all right.’”
Columbia is the oldest record label in the world, founded in 1887; it invented the long-playing record. But no label can survive on inherited glory. “When I got here, it felt like an old place,” Stringer says. “I said, ‘If we put some new in with the old, the old looks better and the new looks great.’ That wall looks a lot better with Barbra Streisand and Adele on it.”
Stringer is a much-loved figure. When he received the Music Industry Trusts Award in London in November 2017, Harry Styles, Camila Cabello and ELO performed in his honour; Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds described him as “an eccentric, a maestro and a Luton fan. That’s a rare and exotic mix.” Like Grainge, Stringer was a punk fan from the outskirts of London (Aylesbury) with a high-flying older brother (Sir Howard Stringer, 76, is the former CEO of the Sony Corporation). He joined the marketing department of CBS (later bought and rebranded by Sony) in 1985 before migrating to A&R, where he made his bones by signing Manic Street Preachers.
“From the minute we met Rob we really liked him,” says the Manics’ bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire. “We might not be together if it wasn’t for Rob. We were on the verge of being dropped and he was the one who said, ‘No. This band’s going to sell a million records one day.’ And luckily we did. We trusted him as an A&R man and a friend. I still call him up for advice.”
“Rob’s a real fan,” says Roger Davies, who manages Sony artists Sade and Pink. “He’ll fly in for gigs in weird places. He’s a great sounding board because he’ll give you a brutally honest opinion and artists respect his opinion because he’s got really good taste.”
Stringer thrived as MD of Epic Records during the boom years, working with artists from the Manics and Sade to Michael Jackson and Céline Dion. But he became chairman of Sony Music UK in 2001, at the dawn of a crisis that went deeper than file-sharing. “It was a very decadent industry,” he says. “It was easy to blame Napster but it wasn’t just that. It was that we couldn’t sign good enough artists.”
Stringer says that he “drowned” when he first took over the UK office and again when he moved to New York, but he’s a fast learner. “They were almost out to get him,” says Wire. “It took astounding willpower to get over that hump. I’ve never known anyone work harder in the music industry than Rob, and he makes you work harder, through sheer enthusiasm and genuine love of music. He’s a remarkable engine, like Roy Keane.”
Stringer remains grateful to the artists, including Jay-Z and Rick Rubin, who trusted him during the rough years. “The artist community accepted me way quicker than the industry,” he says. “They thought I cared and I wouldn’t do stupid things with their music.” His sense of morality is as strong as his work ethic. During our time together, he talks often about respecting artists and instilling the right values in his staff. “It’s easy to do a disc presentation and say, ‘You’re doing great.’ I want to be there when the record hasn’t done as well and there’s a show that’s three-quarters full. Every year, I become more sympathetic to that, and I try to teach my people to behave appropriately.”
During the jackpot years, he thinks, too many people abused the power that they thought was never going away. “A lot of people did stuff they shouldn’t have done: screwed over an artist or trod on someone’s head to get somewhere. I’m super competitive, I hate losing, but I also don’t want to win by doing the wrong thing. Maybe I would have done at 30, but I can look you in the eye and say, ‘I haven’t sold my soul to be here.’”
Stringer loves artists with big ideas. Six years ago, Daft Punk approached him with mocked-up artwork for their Random Access Memories album, bearing the classic Columbia label. They talked about mounting the kind of long, lavish promotional campaign enjoyed by Seventies superstars, with colossal billboards in major cities. “They said, ‘This is what we need a major label for: this optimism and scale. Can a major do this again?’” Stringer remembers. Daft Punk’s Grammy win for Album Of The Year was one of the proudest moments of his career. “You suddenly realised it could be done.”
David Bowie’s 2013 comeback album, The Next Day, his first album for Columbia, called for surprise rather than suspense. Stringer and Bowie maintained a tight shroud of secrecy until the moment the first single appeared online. That success inspired Stringer to suggest that Beyoncé drop her self-titled fifth album unannounced: a bold and oft-imitated move. “I knew it could work,” he says. “It was an incredible record and that helps. I come up with better ideas for incredible records.”
Each of those artists gave Stringer a memento: a bespoke album cover (Rob’s Access Memories), a signed photograph of Bowie, a Beyoncé box set with the handwritten message, “Thanks for making it happen.” “These Holy Grail projects are the ones I’ll remember when they eventually turf me out of this place,” he says, pointing at the picture of Bowie saluting in front of the Manhattan skyline. “Everything was all right, really. I got to work with people like him.”
My mum’s a photographer, my dad’s a psychotherapist and I’m wildly dyslexic,” says Max Lousada, stretching out in his office chair. “The combination of the three has driven me to keep working and not stand still.” It’s October 2017. He’s a fortnight into his new role and already shaking up the executive roster by hiring younger talent. Today he’s in London. Tomorrow he’s off to New York, then Nashville, then a week in LA, another week in London and back to New York. “So that’s my life,” he says with a weary smile. “I’ve learnt to operate with a lack of sleep.”
Tousled and unshaven in a hooded top, Lousada could pass for a maverick tech entrepreneur. He has the kind of unstoppable, youthful optimism that sometimes spills into hyperbole and jargon. “I’ve always wanted a really urgent, warm, aggressive culture,” he says. “It’s a balance. Trying to create change is aggressive behaviour, but there’s a way of doing it that can light up a building.”
“Max is young and he’s old, if you know what I mean,” says Mark Fenwick, the manager of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. “He has an ability to talk to me as a contemporary but with all the knowledge of his own age. I immediately saw that Warner would be crazy not to let him run the world.”
Lousada is accustomed to being the youngest guy in the room. He dropped out of Sussex University to promote clubs in Brighton. Obsessed with hip hop and electronic music, he moved into distribution and, in 1995, cofounded the independent label Ultimate Dilemma. Soon he was running the international arm of revered New York hip hop label Rawkus. “It was the first time I developed a brand when people bought records based on trust in the curation,” he says.
At the end of the Nineties, industry veteran Korda Marshall knocked on the door of Lousada’s office and invited him to join Mushroom Records, home of Muse and Ash. “He walked in and created a whole new chapter for me,” says Lousada. When Warner acquired Mushroom in 2003, Marshall became MD at another Warner subsidiary, Atlantic Records, and made Lousada head of A&R. “I suddenly realised I had to deliver for the organisation,” says Lousada. “I’d always done cool, which hadn’t really sold.” He remedied that by signing The Darkness and Paolo Nutini and overseeing the transformation of Plan B from surly rapper to blue-eyed soul star. “There wasn’t one genre I played in. I always went for unique voices.”
“Max immediately gave us a sense that anything was possible,” says Sam Eldridge, who manages Plan B, Liam Gallagher and Jess Glynne. “I’d never seen someone write ‘Sell a million records’ on a piece of paper like it was something that could happen. I think Max is brilliant at understanding who an artist is and then communicating it very clearly to a wide audience. He understands how to get people to buy into an artist and not just a song.”
“It was obvious from when I first met him that Max had an amazing music brain,” says Ed Sheeran, Warner’s reigning megastar. “His passion and knowledge are second to none and he’s been responsible for so many artists’ success stories.”
In 2013, Lousada took over Warner Music UK, now owned by Russian-born billionaire Leonard Blavatnik. “Len believed in the value of music when people thought that the music business was a silly place to be,” he says. “He wants to foster that maverick spirit in Warner Music.” The major labels have an unfortunate history of initially resisting game-changing innovations – MTV, the CD, the MP3 – because they thought the status quo was working just fine. “We would all admit we didn’t embrace change quick enough because we hadn’t needed to,” says Lousada. “We didn’t want it to break. We all now need to be agile, nimble and fast. We have that ability because we’re the smallest. We have to shed some of the pomp and ceremony in this industry and become more dynamic and inspiring to be around.”
Lousada wants Warner to try everything, from apps and movies to virtual reality and artificial intelligence. “Part of my job is to make change feel exciting rather than scary,” he says. If one idea sums up his vision, it’s the Firepit, an innovation lab, video-content division and in-house recording studio. “Max has revived the tradition of having a studio in the building to encourage the creative process in the heart of the company,” says Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. “He’s a true music man.”
“His feet are very firmly on the ground,” says Mark Fenwick. “We see an incredible amount of stuff that will never work but Max is good at developing ideas that will bear fruit – they’re a road map to the future.”
That’s not to say Lousada doesn’t respect the past. On the wall of his London office hangs a Shepard Fairey triptych of Ahmet Ertegun, the late founder of Atlantic Records. “One of the great things about this industry is it’s a tapestry of wonderful individuals who make a huge difference,” he says. “Ahmet was one of the true greats, from Ray Charles to Aretha to Zeppelin to Phil Collins, a music man who could recite every lyric and sing every song. It’s something I have in my eye line when I’m having a tough conversation to remind me why music is so powerful.”
In 1976, Walter Yetnikoff was so obsessed with his leading rival that he gave CBS employees signs that read “Fuck Warner”. The industry’s recent tribulations have fostered a more collegiate spirit. “When we controlled everything, we punched the shit out of each other,” says Stringer. “Now we have a bigger battle. We have to make sure that our technology partners don’t crush us. We used to control distribution and we probably got greedy and arrogant. Now that we don’t control distribution, we’ve got to make sure that those people don’t get greedy and arrogant too.”
When I ask Lousada about his competitors he doesn’t say Sony or Universal but Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. “There’s obviously competition for talent but I’ve always prioritised competition for the ears and eyeballs of the consumer,” he says. “We live in an attention economy.”
The current CEOs have seen first-hand how the industry was almost capsized by complacency, hubris and fear of change. “The music industry learned that lesson the hard way, before anyone else had to,” says Music Week’s Sutherland. “Nobody’s keen to repeat those mistakes but you never know what’s around the corner. Is there a new format or form of piracy that’s going to undermine growth?”
Take streaming. As well as driving growth, it opens up untapped markets, shakes up the traditional pace of releases, provides granular data that guides hits and presages the phasing out of physical music. But labels need to see millions more paid subscribers and more services entering the market to dilute the duopolistic power of Spotify and Apple. “Not to be overdramatic but I think it’s a race against time,” says Stringer. “We’re not in the middle of this process; we’re at the beginning.”
Grainge, Stringer and Lousada also have to answer a more existential question. Successful artists no longer need labels to make money: in 2011, Americans spent more on live music than recorded music for the first time since the invention of the gramophone. As physical formats fade away, artists won’t need manufacture or distribution either. Stringer compares the record industry to a boutique store on the high street, tucked between megastores like Apple and Google. So what is a record label – or indeed a “music-focused entertainment company” – for?
“That’s a very good question,” says Björn Ulvaeus. “I’m not absolutely sure that those who used to be record companies know exactly what they will be in the future. It’s quite an old-fashioned industry in many ways and it’s being disrupted as we speak.”
There are many possible answers – A&R, curation, strategy, technological innovation – but the most important is a shift in perspective. The men who run the major labels are no longer patriarchs, but partners. “We’re not in control any more and I’m very comfortable with that,” Stringer says, leaning back in his chair. “I didn’t get here to be in control. I got here to do good work with the artists.
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