Feature Articles

Lou Levy Publishers Round Table 1999

II. COPYRIGHT BURNOUT AND THE ART OF ADVERTISING

PAUL MORGAN: The true test of time with a copyright is how strongly, and how long, the copyright impacts people. Because most people remember a certain period of their lives by a song, and now they're being used in movies and commercials as an instant time reference. But when you've got copyrights like Madonna's "Ray of Light" being used in a car commercial today, the burnout of the copyright is more likely, and the cycles between first release and synch usage are spinning so fast...

JEM: Can a copyright really be burned out?

PAUL MORGAN: Certain songs are evergreens, the Beatles catalogue being one -- they're always on the radio, they always come up for placements.

JEM: But a lot of songs that you would hardly consider evergreens are probably making tons of money in films like Casino and Boogie Nights...

PAUL MORGAN: Yeah, there's always a reference point in the times. I mean, the kids who are 13 and buying Ricky Martin and Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, will those songs be in movies as time references in ten years? Most likely, although a lot of them might not be characterful enough...

PAUL ELLIS: Yeah, there are a few that pop out, but if you look at the current Billboard Top 200, I would think the burnout factor would be more severe.

PAUL MORGAN: I think "Livin' La Vida Loca" will be an evergreen. It's full of character and it's been imprinted in so many peoples' minds, they'll hear it and think, "Oh yeah, that was 1999."

PAUL ELLIS: The scary thing is, the world that uses music -- TV, movies, etc. -- I mean, like two weeks after it was #1, "Livin' La Vida Loca" was used on World's Funniest Home Videos as a chintzy keyboard stab line, and whomever let that happen, I think, completely ruined the copyright. People are so blasé about them, but they don't realize the power that music has.

KERRY: There it is again, pressure for your bottom line. I don't want to get too specific with this, but an advertising guy wrote an ad around the lyrics to one of my bands' songs, and the band just would not go for it. And I had a lot of pressure to change their minds, because it would have meant a lot of money.

KIM: I don't think there's anything morally wrong with it. Advertising people argue for it and against it, but the English have always done it very well -- and for years, much longer than here -- with Levi's campaigns and others. They've tied it in with the music industry and worked together.

ERIC: I think advertising industry has almost burned out electronica before the trend even happened. I can't hear a lot of this stuff without envisioning advertising -- it was co-opted so early and used so often for car commercials and everything else, it almost never made it out of the underground because it was already ingrained in peoples' minds as advertising. People have heard the song in an advertisement before they've seen the artist in a music video, so their impression is going to be of advertising.

PAUL ELLIS: In America, there's so much media, it's not really like that in England or Australia. Because of the limited amount of media, so many people can hear that song that it storms up the charts. Whereas here, where you've got a gazillion TV stations --

KERRY: You can penetrate an entire country like England or Australia with one commercial.

PAUL MORGAN: It's like trying to promote a record to the state of New York! I also think with electronica, the song content has been largely low, and therefore radio just hasn't decided to get on board in a big way.

ERIC: Certainly from a publisher's business standpoint it's good, because [advertising] is the only way you'll make your money back.

PAUL MORGAN: People are definitely into the sound, they just need to hear the right song at this stage.

KERRY: It's only in the last couple of years that it's become acceptable here in the U.S. to have your music used in an advertisements, maybe because of the gradual acceptance of TV usages like Dawson's Creek and Party Of Five and their positive results.

PAUL MORGAN: Maybe it's because all of these guitar-oriented bands have seen how the hip hop world has been embracing everything -- clothing lines, acting, endorsements -- and they're thinking maybe things are opening up for them too.

JEM: Or it's a backlash against the alternative-era concept of "indie credibility," back when "selling out" wasn't hip and could destroy your career.

ERIC: I think for the teen audience now, the larger you are, the cooler you are. Like, Puff Daddy is cool because he's exploiting everything everywhere, and they admire that. Seven or eight years ago, people would have said "What a sell-out." Now, it's cool.

KIM: I think people realize now, when they get into the business, that it's all short-term -- you've gotta get in there and [snaps fingers].

PAUL ELLIS: When I was a kid, I'd buy a record because I heard a song on the radio or I read about it in a magazine or a friend told me about it. Now, is it commercials?

IV. THE EVER-CHANGING IMPORT/EXPORT BUSINESS, OR AMERICA'S POP SHORTAGE

KIM: It used to be that if an act broke in America, you'd be guaranteed that it would work in much of the rest of the world. Now, forget it.

PAUL ELLIS: Sarah McLachlan's "Surfacing" has sold over six million records here, and less than 500,000 in the rest of the world.

PAUL MORGAN: The cutting-edge things seem to travel better: Nirvana, the Offspring, Lauryn Hill.

PAUL ELLIS: It's interesting to see how different companies perceive the international market. Some just don't care! There's too much music in the world to begin with, and a label has to deal with its domestic artists, then something comes in from overseas that, if it's a slow-building situation like Sarah McLachlan here in America, people aren't aware of how big the story is becoming.

JEM: Where do most of you find new talent? [To Eric:] Like, why did Zomba find a such gold mine in Sweden?

ERIC: Honestly, that was before my time. Martin Dodd and Steven Howard [of Zomba's London office] are our point-people over there, and I think they saw an opportunity to enter into a partnership with Cheiron, and support them in developing their studio and things like that, which is what we've done. You know, it's an interesting mentality they have over there, very different from our American mentality. It's much more of a hit factory kind of idea: we have our studio and we will hire guys under us, and then people under them, etc.

KERRY: Like Stock, Aitken & Waterman [massively successful British '80s writer/producers for Rick Astley, Kylie Minogue, Bananarama, Jason Donovan, etc.].

ERIC: Yeah, we have one of Waterman's acts, Steps, on our label, but also, Pete Waterman is the icon that is recited over and over for the whole pop thing. He's the guy that defines that whole modern mentality of creating these acts and providing all the material and having people on staff to make the records -

PAUL ELLIS: And not being too precious about it: it's pop music, it's entertainment, let's get it out there.

ERIC: And I think that's what Martin Dodd and Clive [Calder, Jive/Zomba CEO] saw in Cheiron, with Max Martin and Denniz PoP [a.k.a. Dag Volle, very successful Swedish writer/producer whose work with Ace Of Base, Backstreet Boys, Robyn, and many others sold tens of millions of records -- he died of cancer in August, 1998] -- another Pete Waterman, another chance to buy into this factory-kind of operation. Zomba had the Backstreet Boys, and Max quickly stepped up and proved he was the person to develop them. So a lot of it is A&R driven -- we have an act we've signed and we're looking around for material -- and Zomba's always been very writing and production-oriented, as opposed to band-oriented, so operations like Cheiron fit right into our structure.

PAUL ELLIS: It's interesting that Denmark, which traditionally is such a non-funky country, is where Soulshock & Karlin came from. It's all about where the good songs are.

ERIC: International is really important right now, maybe more so than it ever has been. I don't mean this to sound bitter as an American writer, but there really aren't a whole lot of great pure pop songs being created by Americans.

KIM: I've got writers coming in every week from Europe: a guy last week who wrote for N'Sync, a guy this week writing for M2M.

ERIC: Most of the Americans who are able to do this came from that whole '80s-pop thing. There aren't many new young guys coming up who have the level of craftsmanship that you get from Sturken & Rogers [writers/producers for N'Sync, Eternal, Kashif, Christina Aguilera] or Eric Foster White.

PAUL ELLIS: Maybe it's also the fact that for the last ten years here were all about grunge and alternative music, whereas in Europe there's been a lot of pure pop all along. So maybe here there was a slump, and during their developmental years many writers they were slowed down by how uncool pure pop was. You don't see that many just plain writers now -- they're all writer/artists.

KERRY: Which means we'll have to wait another ten or 15 years for all the great American pop songs?

ERIC: By the time they get the hang of it, the Backstreet Boys will be 45 years old!

KIM: But it kind of got out of control here. I remember going to L.A. like eight years ago and there were so many writers being signed, and then there was no work for them.

VII: THE ART OF POP

PAUL ELLIS: I don't think a lot of people thought that "Believe" by Cher would be a hit in America. When I first started playing it for people and told them it was already a huge hit -- I think they thought I was out of my mind!

ERIC: That is so scary. If you can't hear that song's a hit...

PAUL ELLIS: If you come from a pop background, the other A&R people have no respect for you at all. I said, "This is pop music, you Americans need to wake up to the fact that this is happening!" I got a month of hell for that: "Well, we Americans think..."

ERIC: Americans are even worse with dance music. A lot of people don't realize that "Believe" and the Britney records are the standards, those are genuine hits. When you look at the pop charts, a lot of the songs are maybe the third single from a group that's already had a couple of smashes.

PAUL ELLIS: It's momentum at that stage.

ERIC: And they're songs that would have died if they'd been the first single. What you can do on the second or third single is totally different from what you have to do with the first -- which, in the case of "Believe," took Cher's musical career, which was nowhere, and completely revitalized it. That's the power of a real genuine pop hit, and most songwriters don't understand how high that standard is. They'll hear something and say "Well that's as good as 'Drive Me Crazy' from N'Sync's record," but "Drive Me Crazy" was the fourth single.

PAUL MORGAN: If you want to be guaranteed placement on an album, you want to have a song that's good enough to be an out-of-the-box smash.

PAUL ELLIS: But do you think that "Believe" could have worked here without it being #1 in the U.K. and so many other places first?

ALL: No.

PAUL ELLIS: It's such a great song, but it's dance based, and as you said about dance...

KIM: The gay clubs were on it right away! I don't understand why that doesn't translate...

JEM: It's because in America you have black dance music and white dance music, and in Europe you mostly have white dance music -- techno and house, generally -- and everyone understands it, and it's had ten or 15 years to grow and develop a whole culture around it. And here, white dance music is primarily electronica and gay disco, which doesn't usually lead to the mainstream.

ERIC: American radio really resists anything that smacks of disco. In the U.K., you could put quarter-note kick drum on a song and it doesn't mean anything to them. Here, a person immediately thinks disco -- even if it's the Chemical Brothers!

PAUL ELLIS: Radio's just based on too much information here, too much research. If they lose a point in their radio ratings they'll lose a million dollars or more in advertising, so they won't take any risks.

ERIC: That just baffles me. Some of the greatest pop records ever made are dance records.

PAUL MORGAN: Like so many other things in the '80s, I think that house music drove itself into a corner. The beat just didn't evolve.

ERIC: Dance music also became synonymous with artists who had no development: you know, one song, a cheesy video, a big fast push from the record company, and after nine months the artist is forgotten. So now, to sing one of those songs is to immediately cast yourself as that kind of artist. I think it takes Cher or someone at that level, who doesn't have to worry about that -- or at the very least doesn't have as much to lose -- to be able to pull radio out of it.

PAUL MORGAN: Or a Madonna, who can flip in and out of styles. To me she's the best example of an '80s artist who's evolved beyond being a dancefloor act.

ERIC: I think Madonna's one of the greatest songwriters working today.

PAUL MORGAN: She's proof that an artist can keep evolving, and not just doing the same thing over and over from album to album.

JEM: Anyone care to venture a prediction about what's next? I think hip hop is peaking this year -- with Lauryn Hill as the hip hop Nirvana -- and it will gradually be absorbed into the mainstream until something else exciting, like maybe Latin music on a much bigger scale, comes in. [All disagree fairly vehemently with this opinion.]

KERRY: I think this is just the tip of the "hip-hop" iceberg, I think it will cross over even more and become more pop.

JEM: Or pop will become even more like it!

KERRY: And punk rock will be big again.

ERIC: I think really rude punk rock is going to come back. I think some 9-year-old kid is going to look at his 11-year-old sister and say "This stuff she listens to is really lame!" And come back with the hardest-core thing we've ever heard.

JEM: It may already be happening with Limp Bizkit and Static-X and those bands that combine punk and metal and rap. And maybe pop is so big now because --

KIM: Because all these kids' parents hate it!

TOP