Articles & Advice
 Scoppa: Lemme throw some hypotheticals at you: You're about to make a move to another label. During the process, you see something that you're absolutely blown away by and you have to have. What do you do?
Weiss: First thing you do is you talk to the band and you see if they'll wait. If they won't wait, then you call up the label you think you're going to, and you tell them to try to sign them.
Barber: If you don't trust the people you're going to work for enough to let them deal with it, and let them know you're the one who is actually signing it even though you're not there yet, then you shouldn't go to work for them in the first place. Brooks: What's the point of doing a deal if you're about to walk? You're screwing everybody.
Barber: What can possibly be your motivation to sign a band right before you leave a company? Weiss: I don't know. There are people that do it all the time.
Scoppa: Has this happened to any of you guys? You sign an act, you make a record, you feel pretty good about it, and the head of the company decides they don't want to put the record out? Do you have any recourse?
Barber: I would prefer that to what normally happens. At least if they don't put the record out, the artist has a chance to take it somewhere else and have a shot.
 Brooks: Here's a question that strikes right at the heart of your A&R dichotomy of being stuck between the artist and the label, and being in a very real sense the intermediary. In that situation, I don't know. So much of your job anyway is cultivating the people at your label, and the relationships with your higher-ups, and your relationships with your co-workers, and frankly, cultivating your juice within the label so that your artists will be effective within the label context. So you would hope that you can fight that kind of thing. You would hope that (a) it would never happen to you, and (b) if it does happen to you, you'd hope that you could fight it, and (c) if you can't fight it, and there's been a wholesale management change within your company — which has certainly happened to me on a few occasions — again you try to handle your responsibility to the two parties to whom you're responsible as well as you can. You have this primary responsibility to this artist whose trust you've enlisted. If that's what is going to happen to them, then you help as much as you can. You find them another home. You give them moral support. You do what you can do.
 Weiss: When I was at A&M, and Matthew Sweet handed in his second A&M record [later titled Girlfriend], I was the product manager, and I was a big Matthew Sweet fan. I thought it was a great record, and I thought it was a real step in the right direction. So I said to the higher-ups, "If you're thinking of this in a small way, if you're thinking of him as a cult artist who is going to sell 20,000 records or less next time, you should not put this record out. If that happens, it will not be helpful to him or you." A&M realized that they didn't have a vision for the record that was broader than that. It was the right decision because, at that point, Matthew Sweet didn't fit in anywhere, and A&M wasn't ready to prioritize him in a way that would have been meaningful. The record probably would have come out if a few people hadn't intervened. It has worked out much better because A&M did let him go, and Zoo wound up doing a great job with the record.
Brooks: The tale can definitely have a happy ending. When I was at Polygram, I was the U.K./European product manager for Mother Love Bone. Obviously, that was a tragic story to begin with. I was working in London at the time, and I was back in New York for meetings. Kelly Curtis and Stone and Jeff came into the office, and everybody shut their doors and pretended they were in meetings. Nobody even wanted to be around to say hi. I had never been so full of admiration as I was for Michael Goldstone when he walked from the label and continued to support his artist. When it came back together in a viable form, he had it at Epic, and the rest is history. He stuck by his band. Whenever I see an A&R person who fiercely, fiercely believes in an act, and there's not a lot of support within the company, I think about that. Sometimes you really have to stand up for it if you believe in it, and it can really pay off. It meant a hell of a lot to me to see that go down.
TOP
| 
