Danny Goldberg, President, Gold Village Entertainment

This article originally appeared in Dean Media Solutions on Apr 17, 2009

What can you say about a career that spans: reviewing the 1969 Woodstock Festival, publicist for Led Zeppelin, co-producer and co-director of No Nukes starring Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne, manager of Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth, The Allman Brothers and the Beastie Boys, president of Atlantic Records, Chairman & CEO of first WB Records then Mercury Records, founder of Artemis Records, CEO of Air America and author of Bumping Into Geniuses, among other ventures…you’ll have to read on 

Danny Goldberg

To coin a phrase, this man has practically done it all, and done it all in fine fashion. In order to fully appreciate the depth of Danny Goldberg’s storied career one must visit his latest company’s website (www.goldve.com) for a perusal of his full biography. You are guaranteed to come away very impressed with the exceptional range of his background.

Goldberg’s career spans five decades of music industry association where he has worked with some of the most legendary names in the business. From 1983-1992, Goldberg was the founder and President of Gold Mountain Entertainment, a personal management firm whose clients included Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth, Bonnie Raitt, The Allman Brothers, Rickie Lee Jones, Allanah Myles, Tom Cochrane and the Beastie Boys. He has also run major record labels like Atlantic, Warner Bros. and Mercury, and has been an ongoing illustrious force in the business for the success he’s enjoyed as well as the challenges he’s pursued.

In July of 2006, Goldberg formed Gold Village Entertainment (GVE), where he manages the careers of Steve Earle, The Hives, Allison Moorer, Dolores O’Riordan, Ben Lee, Tom Morello, Care Bears On Fire and the Old 97’s, among others, and in September of 2008 his book of memoirs, Bumping Into Geniuses, was released.

You began your career in the late sixties as a journalist and recently authored a book about your experiences in the music business. What was the motivation behind the book and your return to writing?
I always had in the back of my mind that I would write a book at some point. I’m one of those people that ever since I was a kid I was kind of always writing a book in my head because I always read a lot. I felt there would come a time where some of my experiences would make an interesting book.
It really became more specific when Warren Zevon told me he was dying and that he was going to make his last record. That was such an extraordinary human drama. I knew that was something I was going to remember and write about and Warren was in favor of it because he loved to read and write as well. So I would take notes during the times I would visit the studio and although it’s the last chapter in the book, it was the first chapter I wrote. Once I had that I knew it was time to write the book. I had been atAir America knowing that it was heading toward bankruptcy and I was in a funk as to what to do. It gave me some extra psychic energy to try and pull a book proposal together because it was something I could control. It wasn’t dependent on investors or anyone else and once I sold the concept of the book I had to write it.

What can readers expect from Bumping Into Geniuses?
I’ve been in the business since the late sixties and I wanted to deal with only the artists I worked with closely and knew well, not simply everyone I had ever met. The longest chapter is about Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, who I co-managed with John Silva. There’s a long chapter about Led Zeppelin who I worked for as a PR guy as well as being the VP of their label Swan SongRecords. There’s a chapter about Stevie Nicks. Paul Fishkin and I owned a label called Modern Records which released her early solo albums. There’s the chapter about Zevon and the last three albums he made for my label Artemis and what it was like working with him, especially during the last year of his life.
I start the book by describing how I got into the business doing a clerical job at Billboard magazine when I was 18 years-old and how I wormed my way into writing reviews of Rock shows that none of the older guys wanted to cover, and by a fluke I got to cover the Woodstock Festival in 1969. I describe the business in the late sixties/early seventies when I entered it and the Rock culture which included Underground radio (the beginning of FM Rock radio) and the early Rock magazines and the constellation of what the record companies and booking agencies looked like at that time leading up to when I met Led Zeppelin. That’s the band that really put me in the business simply by saying they liked me.

Which artist influenced you the most?
Kurt Cobain was the most impressive because of the breath of things he was good at. He had demons personally and had tragically killed himself and no one who was ever friends with someone who kills himself ever gets over it and I never will. But it doesn’t take anything away from his many talents. He wrote all of the music for Nirvana. I always say that in Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page wrote the music and Robert Plant wrote the lyrics. Well, Kurt Cobain wrote the music and lyrics for all of Nirvana’s original songs. He was responsible for the sound of the records. There were outside producers, but Kurt made every final decision about mixing, sequencing and mastering. He wrote the treatments for all the music videos. He designed the album covers. He was hyper-sensitive to PR details even once asking me to change a sentence in the Geffen Records bio when Nevermind first came out because it was stimulating more questions about politics than he thought was appropriate. He was very conscious as the band got famous that his photo was constantly being taken and he kept making sure he looked differently to keep it fresh.
He had this full picture in his mind with crystal clarity about what it was to be a Rock star and he executed it flawlessly. Again, his personal demons were profound and he had a history of depression and drug abuse before he became famous. I don’t think fame particularly helped but it was certainly something he sought, worked for and earned. He was truly amazing and single-handedly changed Rock & Roll. There were radio stations that became successful because they were playing Nirvana and there were bands that were able to walk in their footsteps as Alternatives to the Hair Bands that came before them. It wasn’t just an American phenomenon; he did it on a global basis as well. 

After a 14-year hiatus from artist management you returned to the field. What was the impetus to your return?
It may have been 14 years removed from artist management but it was only about a year from being away from the music business. Most of the things I did the years I was working at record companies were very similar to what I do as a manager which is make decisions about what artists to work with and help to market and maximize their careers. It’s a different way of getting paid and in 2007 when I started this company it didn’t appear to be a good time to start a new record label. There are some great independent record companies that have survived but in general the record business has been under assault because of Internet piracy.

In a sense the industry is going full circle, do you feel your interests have as well?
The artist business is still pretty good in some areas and I was always someone who identified a lot with artists. The live business has been very healthy and the songwriting business has held up better than the record business. I also felt where I was at personally that I liked the idea of starting something small by myself without having to write a business plan and do a lot of third party pitching. Not that I would rule out partners in the future. I love collaboration, but I think it’s a time when small teams of people are required to deal with the complexities of the business. I was lucky enough that Steve Earle was looking for a manager just when I was starting this and he became our first client and Allison Moorer his wife, a great singer/songwriter, became our second client.

Is there a common thread among the artists you manage today?
I certainly look at touring as the primary business and they are all committed to touring. It’s a cash flow business and it’s a way of building long-term fans. They’re all very good live. They’re all astute about dealing with the media. I believe this is a moment where artists have to kind of co-manage themselves in terms of understanding enough about the business and have the ability to project an image and reach out to people. I will say this, and it may sound corny, but they are all nice people. I’m at a point in my life where I am grateful to be working with people I like hanging out with. There are good days and bad days, but I’m very proud of the quality of music that everyone I work with makes. How the business responds always varies, but I believe anyone can look at our roster and whatever they thought about the artists commercially at any given moment, I believe any objective person would say that all of them are really talented.

What are the biggest challenges in marketing artists who are not signed to major labels?
Whether or not they are signed to major labels, the biggest challenge is the decline of the record business. There are thousands of jobs that have been lost as a result of the decline of CD sales and a lot of those jobs involved artist development, song placement in movies, maximizing tours and other types of promotion and marketing energy that artists still need even though record companies can’t provide because of the changing financial fortunes. So somehow you have to replace that energy the best you can as a manager whether it’s staffing up ourselves or outsourcing to independents to compensate for the decline in staffing at record companies.
Another challenge is the advances are not as big. However, recording costs have gone down with the advent of Pro-tools where artists can make recordings for a fraction of what it used to cost. Of course, I still prefer when we can get good advances for our clients, but we don’t need them as much as we used to. We do however need the marketing and it’s a challenge to do it without the infrastructure the record companies used to have.

What is the biggest difference between major versus indie label for your needs?
In general, I believe the majors are best at Pop promotion. Most of the artists I work with are better served by indie labels both domestically and around the world where there’s more of an incentive to build incrementally and less pressure to have a big explosion in one particular financial quarter. The majors are still served well by the mainstream Pop machine in their quest for quick success.
It used to be you tried to get signed to a major label and they did all the marketing and promotion. But as I mentioned earlier the majors are short staffed these days. A lot of the artists I have are not right for the majors because they don’t necessarily have the kind of songs that are going to be on CHR or sell two million ring-tones, but they can make real money live and they are important artists to me and their fans. The marketing infrastructure labels used to have for non-Pop artists almost doesn’t exist anymore so we have to try and figure out how to compensate for that and determine what matters and what doesn’t in a fragmented environment. 

What are the biggest differences you see in the ownership of major labels today versus the sixties, seventies and eighties?
Ownership has been unstable since I’ve been in the business. I look back and there was Columbia Records that was part of CBSwhich became part of Sony, then they merged with BMG, then they bought BMG. Atlantic was an independent company which was bought by a car rental company (Kinney), then it became part of Warner Communications and then part of Warner Music…they spin out Warner Music and now it’s a separate public company. You can virtually go through every single label and have the same amount of ownership changes over the years.
We tend to romanticize the past because we think of the giants like Ahmet Ertegun, Berry Gordy and Mo Ostin, but we forget that there were also many mediocre executives in the sixties and seventies. There are some brilliant people today. Jimmy Iovine is as brilliant, resourceful and creative an executive as ever existed. LA Reid, Lyor Cohn, Barry Weiss, Steve Barnett, David Massey, Monte Lipman and obviously Doug Morris are all very impressive executives, and there are a number of others.
But the business is smaller today and it’s a terrible problem for these guys. Retail has shrunk, there are fewer accounts, the trends are not good and the conversion to digital is not replacing the lost income of CD sales. Some of the costs have gone down but not as much as revenues have declined and you’re now in the same pool as the general worldwide economy. So there are fewer options today. It was easier to be creative when you were paying a very low royalty to the artists and there was no piracy and you had a bourgeoning baby boom generation. So Warner Bros. could afford a huge staff and do all kinds of artist development. But it’s not Tom Whalley’s fault that sales are half of what they used to be and therefore he can’t have the staff that Mo Ostin had back in the seventies. It’s just a totally different playing field.

Given the changing dynamics of the business, has the playing field been somewhat neutralized for the indie label business?
This phenomenon has definitely given rise to a renaissance of indie labels and because indie labels don’t have to show a quarterly profit and can be more nimble in adjusting to changes you see a lot of very impressive labels at a level that hasn’t been seen since the sixties. Labels like Epitaph, Vagrant, Downtown, Sub-Pop and Merge are all great labels that any of my clients would be happy to be on. The same is true in Europe with labels like Cooking Vinyl and Play It Again Sam. It’s a good time for indie labels where you have entrepreneurs that are building mid-size businesses and where music is really a big deal to them as opposed to being a division of a giant corporation where music is a secondary factor to other kinds of products and demands. We’re also seeing a lot of energy in other parts of the business besides record companies like talent agencies and concert promoters. These are folks who are now major players in the music business because with the decline of major labels a lot of the marketing and investment energy has shifted from the point of view of the artist.

What are your thoughts on the music industry’s attempts to create and capture a desirable digital retail model on the Internet?
First of all I do not claim to be a tech genius or prophet who knows the model that ideally works, but honestly I’m not that optimistic about it. I hope someone comes up with one. I think half a loaf is better than none and we have half a loaf now. Of course, if there is a subscription model that generates income my clients would want their fair share.  In trying to harness a model, the power of cell phone companies and tech companies is great but I don’t know if you can fully replace the income. You have to look at other areas like licensing, concerts and merchandising, things that are not damaged by the digital world. However, I don’t see a magic silver bullet restoring the billions of dollars of lost CD sales.
I’m all in favor of experimentation but Internet piracy is a very tough thing to fight and it’s not just the music business. For years a lot of people in the press were saying record executives were all idiots and not real business people and if real business people were involved they would have done things much better. But look at the newspaper and magazine businesses. Are they idiots too? The movie business is now dealing with piracy. It’s a sign that this digital phenomenon that undermines the value of intellectual property is not limited to the music business and the executives in these other fields aren’t dealing with it any better. It’s a global trend where the leaders of the world economy and political institutions at some point are going to have to decide if they want to protect intellectual property.

What one area of the artist marketing equation do you deem as the most valuable component?
It’s mostly about concerts and touring for me. Concerts used to be an adjunct to the business and the record label was the center of the wheel. Now, the live business is the center and record labels are just one of many elements. The label used to be the most important and now it’s not, and that to me is irreversible. Looking at the business solely through the prism of a record company is pointless. You have to look at it through the perspective of the real business that you know is there, and the concert business has never declined. It’s a multi-billion dollar business and everything else serves that. Live entertainment existed before there were records and it exists as records decline. It’s an enduring part of societies all over the world. You see the same thing with live sports. The live event still holds a tremendous value that hasn’t been diminished by the development of technology.
If you go to a concert without a valid ticket, 99 out of 100 times you won’t get in. There’s going to be a security person there that will enforce that. There’s not the opportunity for piracy. On the consumer side, people who won’t pay $15 for a CD will pay $100 for a concert ticket or $20 for a T-shirt not because the recordings are less valuable they’re just easy to get for free and it’s near impossible to get these other things for free.

What is your take on some of the artist mega-deals made in the last year by Live Nation?
I’m jealous! I wish I had clients that can get those kinds of deals and I wish I could get paid on those kinds of deals. At the moment I don’t have anyone in that category. I know that Madonna, for example, is incredibly valuable as a live artist. But I don’t know if the idea of making a 360 deal that includes the live business for a big live artist justifies writing out a big check. I’m not privy to the accounting, so from Live Nation’s point of view I don’t know how these deals will play out.

Can the 360 model honestly work within the framework of music labels where the label participates in multiple revenue generating streams?
Every company is different and every artist is different. It depends on the amount of money they’re offered. It depends on the capability of the company to offer meaningful services. It depends on whether the artist has other options and where they’re at in their career. There are some examples where it has made sense. A classic example would be Interscope with the Pussycat Dolls. They clearly breathed life into that as a music act and invested a lot of money. It’s totally appropriate they made half the profits. I believe it worked for everybody. But if you have an act that already has a vibrant touring career and they’re making $100,000 a night and then some record company wants a piece of that in return for making a record, that’s not very attractive to an artist. If they want to put records out the value has to equate to what they get on the back end.
The majors in general don’t have too many examples of success that have worked for artists with this model. They will need staffs that can provide a multiplicity of services that would match the income streams. Otherwise the artists are paying double, and given the economic conditions artists can’t sustain double commissions.

During 2005-06 you were CEO of Air America Radio. What was the motivation to make that kind of career crossover?  
I have long been a political activist and was very critical of the Bush administration. I was very much an admirer of Al Franken, Jon Sinton and others who formed Air America. I was truly inspired by what Al did on the radio and respected him for what he did in his books criticizing Rush Limbaugh. As a consumer, fan and citizen Air America spoke to me and fit my notion of what I thought the country needed. I had written a book called How The Left Lost Teen Spirit (published in 2005) about the need for the political left to reach out to the true populace media outside the world of PBS and Op Ed pages.
I’m a true fan of the Air America concept. I still believe that reaching out to people in cars during drive times where Talk Radio is one of the main options is really important if you want to be a part of the political conversation in the country. It wasn’t an easy way to go and the scope and vision didn’t match the funding. The vision was a 24/7 network of shows and the funding was more appropriate to a few syndicated shows. The original investors severely underestimated the cost of their vision and the difficulty of attracting other investors and it caused a lot of stress on everyone involved including me.
Air America has been reinvented by new owners as a syndication company and there are still some wonderful shows and although they haven’t produced the left wing equivalent of Limbaugh or Michael Savage, I hope eventually they do. It’s hard to develop talent in the Talk Radio business as it is in music and Hollywood. You can’t just do it by wanting it. You have to have someone who has talent as a broadcaster to get those kinds of ratings. But during this time outlets like MSNBC have emerged and the rise of the Internet has created things like The Huffington Post and I believe there’s a much more robust multi-faceted political conversation in the country than there was ten years ago.

Did you learn much about the radio business in the process?
For me being in the music business for so many years and then going into the radio business was a valuable experience. It was fun to go around and meet people from Clear Channel in a collegial way instead of begging them to play my record. It gave me the opportunity to understand their issues and the radio business in general. I was able to better understand the real nature of what the radio business is all about which is getting ratings, selling advertising and dealing with corporate parents. On a personal basis however, Air America was at least as much about the political agenda as it was about the business.