Dan Beck On Marketing Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper And More

In this interview, Dan Beck discusses the difficulties he experienced as part of Michael Jackson's marketing team during a time when the 'King of Pop' began to go off the rails.

Carl Wiser (Songfacts): You've had a very interesting career. You were working on the Michael Jackson HIStory album at a time when he was clearly coming unhinged, and you were in charge of the marketing. How did you handle that?

Dan Beck: It was unbelievable, really Carl. Everything changed all the way along. You think you're in charge but you're really not. More and more things would happen and it was just a really, really challenging experience and I was very concerned that the album would come out and it would just be the absolute biggest disaster in the history of the music industry… and it had my name on it.

When I started working with him on the Dangerous album [released in 1991], we were still thinking about how we could rehabilitate his career. He did the Super Bowl halftime and he did the Oprah interview at the ranch, and there were all kinds of really good things going on, but it just started to slide downward. And it's frightening to work with such a magnificent career and see it crumbling. It was just a sad situation and a very intense time.

Carl: In that very last documentary that Jackson did, it becomes clear he's very strong-willed. So, if he would make a decision, he was going to push that through pretty much no matter what. Is that what happened when you were doing the work on these albums?

Dan: It was a culmination of things. If Michael got things in his head, they became very fixed and he was very focused to move forward. A lot of what we tried to do was to establish a perspective and reasons to do things before he would get positioned on it. He was very open-minded to those kinds of ideas when he didn't have something fixed in his head, and I thought he was a wonderful collaborator in the sense that he always appreciated ideas and was very thoughtful. That's why so many really talented people liked to work with him – from Quincy to the choreographers to the video directors, the big names that were involved through his career – because in that collaborative effort he was just a pleasure to work with.

Carl: The other thing that really surprises me about the guy is that he was such a wonderful songwriter, and it seems like you need to have some kind of grounded life experience to write these really relatable songs. Jackson was born in a bubble, yet he was still able to write songs that moved ordinary people.

Dan: Very much so. I was around him when he was in the studio, and he was never particularly a musician in the technical sense – he was a guy with ideas in his head and he would interpret them through musicians. But I think so much of songwriting comes from isolation. Even as a child performer he had a lot of isolated time where he wasn't like everybody else, and I think that's why he became such a good writer. He was also a student of the whole business and I think that is part of it too.

There are people who overwhelm you with what they have contributed creatively, whether it's John Lennon or Kris Kristofferson, and I think Michael was inspired that way.

Carl: Did you have any musical training?

Dan: I played piano but I was not technically very good. I started trying to write songs – simple chords and that sort of thing – early on, and then I had a passion for writing lyrics and decided to collaborate and write with other people. I wrote a lot of lyrics initially with my own melodies in my head, and if I ever used those with people I generally didn't tell them what my melody was, because my hope was that they would come up with something that exceeded my own idea, and that's usually what happened. But I had a sense of meter that really helped when I collaborated.

But I was not a very good musician and I thought I was going to hold myself back as a writer if I tried to do the music as well.

Carl: What are some of these musical collaborations you've had?

Dan: Well, early on, Dion DiMucci of Dion and the Belmonts. It was really Dion's later career. There was an album on Lifesong Records called Return of the Wanderer and I had a couple of songs on that, one called "Midtown American Main Street Gang" and another one called "(I Used To Be A) Brooklyn Dodger." They weren't hits but they remained in Dion's set for a long time and we always got great reviews.

It's funny, there was a review once that both elated me and stuck a knife in my heart at the same moment. I believe it was Greil Marcus who did a review of a Dion greatest hits album in Rolling Stone and at the end of the review, he said the only thing wrong with this greatest hits is that "Brooklyn Dodger" isn't on it. I thought, Wow! What a wonderful statement. And Oops, I'm not on there. So, I got the best and the worst of it in the same moment.

Carl: Well, you were predominantly on the other side of the industry, so you were the record company guy.

Dan: Yes, and in some ways that inhibited me as a writer because I was a service guy. I was a product manager most of my career, so my job was to be the coordinating guy, the connector between the manager and the artist to help them get through it. And I did not want to raise my personal passions to the people I worked with because they were pursuing their passion, and I'm supposed to be involved in helping them get there. I always thought it was complicating if I brought it to people's attention, so I kept it very low profile.

All an artist really wanted to hear from me was how to get through this CBS Records or this Sony system, and I had a passion for helping them get through that system. There was nothing better than to show them how to use the machine, and it became a wonderful, creative experience for me to try to help artists get that huge engine behind them and get the sales force behind them.

We always think of all the money that these companies have, but what it really was back in the physical days was the people. You could get the college reps and the sales force really into a record and you could have a thousand people out there working it with their heart if they were into an act.

So, that became a passion to me and I didn't want to complicate the process. I was working 12 hours a day and then trying to do some writing in the after hours with people, which was challenging trying to match up my hours with other artists.

Carl: There are two big complaints you hear from artists about their record companies, and I'd like to get your thoughts on what side you stand on. Probably the biggest is: The record company didn't give us creative control. They tried to tell us what to do and they ruined the project.

Dan: Well, I had a funny experience with the guys at Cheap Trick, with Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander. I was their product manager and we hung out a lot, and they are wonderfully funny, cynical guys. They had every kind of up and down in this business [A big up: their 2016 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame].

We would get together, and one night after a show we were back at the hotel having a drink and they were busting on the record company, just for sport. I told them, "Look guys, it's all yourfault." They said, "What are you talking about?" And I said, "Well, you listened to us when you shouldn't have and you didn't listen to us when you should have."

Different acts go through different circumstances at the labels, and in some cases they had wonderful mentors. Sometimes independent artists, the resource they don't have is some veteran idea person that just brings a great idea to them. When Johnny Cash covered a Nine Inch Nails song, how did that happen? My thought is that Rick Rubin knew this song and said, "Wouldn't it be amazing if Johnny Cash recorded that?"

Sometimes 19-year-old kids in a band don't have the advantage of that broad thinking, and some artists from my early years in the business really had that resource. Now, there's always been overbearing people in the record business and artists have always had to fight for their creative freedom. It's art versus commerce.

Carl: Did you ever see a case where it was glaringly obvious that the record company was interfering when they shouldn't have?

Dan: When Cyndi Lauper signed with Epic back in the early '80s, one of the things she told me coming into the company was that everybody she had talked to in the business before that, because she had a great voice, they wanted to make her like a Streisand or like an adult contemporary act, and she had to fight that all the way. Finally she signed with Epic because she was going to have the opportunity to pursue it more in the way she wanted.

The last artist that I managed, Will Grey, who passed away tragically a couple of years ago, he had major label interest in signing him, and he was a really roots-oriented act. I said, "The A&R guys love you but they're going to sign you and then the marketing and promotion people are going to come in and say, 'This is wonderful but we can't get it on the radio.'" And I said, "You're going to get dropped. As much as the A&R people love you, you could be one-and-done so quickly because it doesn't fit into their narrow path."

Carl: The next big complaint that you always hear is: The album is wonderful but the record company didn't promote it and that's why it tanked.

Dan: Yeah, certainly those things happen. Maybe even more so now because they have smaller rosters and there's more focus, there's more of a necessity for them to try to make it happen. Now, their attention span might not be as long and they may not stay with it.

For the amount of investment that is in a project, you've got to get the litmus test to the consumer. And today it's a business of taking the middle man out of it anyway. It is artist to audience – that's the litmus. The consumer is king today, and it doesn't serve anybody well if you're at a record company and you don't find out if the consumer likes it. Why bother making the record if you're not going to find out?

Carl: Were you ever one of the guys in charge of picking the singles?

Dan: Well, picking the singles was usually market research and consensus. Maybe Clive Davis said that's the single, but I always thought that the single process was extremely thoughtful and very thorough in te
rms of gauging what the artist wanted, and then if that consensus was there between the label and the artist, it was really obvious. But a lot of times the promotion department was extremely involved in that process and often went out and whispered in people's ears to get a radio opinion and you tried to bring as much information into the process as possible.

I've worked with some independent labels, what I call hobbyists, who start a little record company because they have money or whatever, and they think because they're head of the record company they should pick the singles. I'd rather be in the process of finding out what other people think than sitting there saying I have golden ears.

Carl: What you're saying is that it's research driven and that audiences hear this song before it's released in very structured environments. That's not the image of some guy sitting in his office going, "That's the single."

Dan: Right. When an album is finished, it gets played around the company a little bit and everybody's a fan. Sometimes a song just says, "It's got to be me!" and you go with it. So much of it is trying to keep it as uncomplicated as possible with as much information as you can.

There would be discussions about how a song is a great ballad but we can't open with a ballad at radio because it may take us too long for the song to burn-in and radio will get impatient and we'll lose it. So there's also the considerations of the process: how you get the momentum going in the right way. And that may affect how you select singles as well. Those are things we saw over the years many, many times.

Carl: Did you ever see a specific case where they clearly chose the wrong one but didn't realize it until after that one tanked and the next song became a big hit?

Dan: Usually if you're wrong you don't get the chance on the second one, and believe me, that's a huge case because it's a perception business. If people think it's not hot then trying to regenerate the momentum is very difficult. I can't think of a specific example where an obvious hit was missed, but so much of it ends up in the gray area and that's the bad place to be.

Carl: How did you end up writing with Gary and Jann?

Dan: Well, Gary and I had an interesting relationship because as a marketing person at Epic we called upon the creative services department – advertising design, copywriters, album cover design, market research – that was all the core company, and Epic as a label we would source those, as would Columbia. The Columbia people would use the CBS creative services department and Epic would too. We were like the client but to an in-house resource. Gary was a copywriter, and Gary and I just really loved to work together, and we had a couple of really special things come out of it.

When I product managed The Clash, Gary came up with the line, "The Only Band That Matters" and I approved it. It became one of the lynchpins of the campaign. Gary was always easy to work with because he just went for what it was if he was working on music that he respected. So, I knew him that way and then we actually did put out an album on Captain Beefheart and made a video with a guy named Ken Schreiber. We were all friends, and we did a really low-end video that turned out pretty good.

So, Gary and I were friends from that time and every once in a while we would run into each other. Gary knew that I had written with Dion and with Felix Cavaliere and The Rascals. So, years later, Gary and I would run into each other every once in a while, and he got Jann Klose the gig working on the Greetings from Tim Buckley film – Gary was the music consultant and Jann did the Tim Buckley voice. I was talking to Gary and he said, "Hey, do you think I should write with Jann?" And I said: "Gary, I think it would be great."

Jann and I had a conversation within a week or two of that and he was saying, "Do you think I should write with Gary?" I thought it was a great idea, and about two-three weeks into it, Gary called me up and said, "Hey, you write lyrics. Why don't you work with us?" I thought maybe it would be fun, so we got together and that's how it came about. We had a lot of fun doing it.

Carl: Some of these songs are so conflicted. For instance, you wrote a song with those guys called "Let No One Come Between Us" which has a fantastic line: "Between my id and ego you found my lost libido." And then you go down a couple of tracks later and we're in the "Well of Loneliness." So, tell me about the thought process behind coming up with these.

Dan: "Let No One Come Between Us" was really that tension. When I heard the verse music it was really upbeat and musically it had a lot of attitude to it, so I thought of that kind of tension and sexuality between a singer and the audience. I thought of Jann really getting into it with the audience. I really see that as a live song.

For me as a lyricist, it really comes from the music, and that's how we approached these songs. Gary is lightning fast – he could write a hundred songs a day. He's just unbelievable. He would throw something out there and then Jann would start riffing on top of it. I'm never going to sing these songs, so I was trying to put it in a place for them. It's like doing theater: you're kind of putting yourself into their place and seeing what would feel comfortable.

But I saw "Let No One Come Between Us" as a great live song with a vocalist bantering with the audience. That was fun to write that way.

On "Well of Loneliness," Gary came up with the title and we were building off that. I remembered the old blues line – I'm going to paraphrase it, but basically, "I was so down the bottom looked like up." I just wanted to emulate that in some way, so that's what we did.

And then I thought about life at my age, thinking kind of blues-ish:

Life's too fast
I'm too slow
You dream too high
And you come to know
You're born with nothing
You die with less
I'm living in the well of loneliness

In that sense it was trying to do something that was conversational, something that seemed so natural to say. The music of that song reminded me of Three Dog Night, so I thought of what Hoyt Axton would write for Three Dog Night.

Carl: Tell me about the song "Nobody's Talking."

Dan: It's poking a little fun at the whole phone gazing thing and saying we all do it and we're all on different sides of every fence. It was writing a little kind of freeform, non-sequitur, just having fun with it. That was the sense of it.

Gary actually came up with the left and the right thing and I recalled Shabba Ranks when we were having a party for him to give him a gold record or something, somebody said, "You're such a star," and he was very humble. He said, "No I'm not a star," and then he paused a minute and said, "I'm just a constellation." It always stuck with me.

It's also about people who communicate through their phones and people who are communicating outwardly, like the people that are passing a joint or having a margarita or having a martini – life is full of people being both those ways. It was a reflection on all that.

Carl: On your song "Mary Magdalene" there is this tremendous hook that comes in, which is one of those that you don't expect. The song straddles that line between being about this tragic event and finding a way through it. Can you talk about coming up with that song and if any of you guys were affected by that tragedy?

Dan: We put the music down and we didn't really have a direction for it. It was the first song we wrote together, the three of us, and I took it home and was listening. It wasn't that long after Sandy, and I live on the South Shore of Long Island and there was a lot of impact there. Where I live is in Rockville Centre, just north of the people affected.

We still had power, and a lot of people from the South Shore had no place to eat and their food was ruined, so everybody flooded to Rockville Centre. It was the only place there was a gas station open, it was the only place there was a 24-hour diner, and so people were lined up everywhere. My kids were working handing out FEMA packages and water and whatever else.

So, yeah, I was moved by it and then hearing the music I started thinking of the song in two ways: number one, that this terrible thing happened, and number two, that we survived it. So, the verses really are telling the story, and to me the story really was in Breezy Point with these Irish firemen. It's somewhat of an Irish enclave down there, and firemen and policemen, their own homes were burning and they're in a flood. What they usually use to put out a fire was inhibiting them from actually saving their own homes, and it just was such an irony to me.

So, I went back to Gary and Jann and I said, "I've got a little bit of an idea here about Sandy. How would you guys feel about that?" Because with topical songs sometimes people say, "Well, I don't really want to get that out front." And they both totally responded to it and started telling me about their own experiences – Jann going out to Staten Island and Gary talking about Lower Manhattan and the whole thing – and they were just like "Yeah!"

So, it gave me the confidence. There are really two steps to the song: one is through the verses, telling the story, and the other is the chorus, where I envisioned the firemen exhausted, having a beer afterwards saying, "We got through this."

And then I started thinking about the whole Irish impact. We had friends that lived out on Long Beach who lost their home, and started thinking about how their whole thing was trying to reconstruct their home. To me it was like a resurrection, and then I thought of old biblical stories. The first witness to a resurrection was supposedly Mary Magdalene, and I thought, Here's to you and me and Mary Magdalene. And let's toast to getting through this, let's toast to our survival and resurrecting our lives.

I'd like to hear it get covered by a traditional Irish act with that instrumentation, whether it's bagpipes or whatever. I would find it interesting for an Irish act to perform a song about an Irish-American tragedy. It would make this song about 100 years old in a minute.

I knew Shel Silverstein quite well. When I started my career in Nashville he would stop by my office all the time and we would sit around in the morning and have coffee and talk. And here is a guy who wrote "The Unicorn," which I always thought had been written 200 years ago. Shel and I would sit around and talk about "Boy Named Sue" and how he wrote that and "The Cover of Rolling Stone" but what always was amazing to me was that he wrote something that was like a song you would think was 100 years old.

So, it was trying to write something lasting about this event because I thought this whole story is going to go down in history. People will tell their grandkids about that storm.

Carl: A lot of people when they hear all those songs, they don't realize they're written by a Jewish guy from Chicago.

Dan: Yeah, that's right!

Carl: Thinking about the line, "The Only Band That Matters" for The Clash, that is about the most perfect positioning statement I can imagine, and it was very relevant in the '70s/'80s/'90 because when you were a disc jockey you were starved for this kind of stuff. You've got 12 seconds to talk up some song: "The only band that matters: here's The Clash."

And today it would be a Tweet. It could be a hashtag. Is that what you guys were essentially looking for when you were in the marketing department?

Dan: You work with lots of acts and every act that I was assigned to be the product manager, you meet the manager, you meet the act, and you try to come up with why it's relevant to you. You've got to put a lot of work into them. Sometimes you really like them as people, sometimes you love their commerciality – you try to find those things that motivate you.

Well, with The Clash it was like, Oh my god, I'm so lucky to be working on something that you could be so passionate about. And that line, it wasn't like we were looking for something particular. Sometimes we were for other acts, but in the case of The Clash I think it was Gary just evolving what spoke to who the band were. It was right, and of course, everybody liked it.

We had no real expectation at the time that it was a lasting phrase. We were looking for something of the moment and it just stayed with the band. It's funny because the band would come up on the floor – The Clash and Bernie Rhodes and Kosmo Vinyl – and I'd be out in the hallway and they'd say, "Oh, here they come, the guys that love to hate us."

They loved it. They loved what we were doing, but they would complain like crazy: "Oh my god, how could you do something so commercial?" It's one of those great, fun moments in the business.

Carl: Well, The Clash are funny because they were never on an independent label – they were always part of this machine.

Dan: Yes, that's right. They really were.

Carl: So, I wonder if you guys were ever sitting in an office trying to think of a positioning statement for a band, because it's not something that many bands have. For instance: The Rolling Stones – The World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band; Aerosmith – The Bad Boys from Boston. And then if you don't get one, people make it up for you, so Bruce Springsteen becomes The Boss, even though he never wanted that. Are those actual discussions?

Dan: You're not looking for the ultimate tag. Maybe you're coming up with something for an advertising campaign for the record or something to give some definition.

People say, "Oh, that's a combination of such-and-such a band and…" Why? Because it just seems that people need some direction – they need something to hang their hat on: "What kind of band is that?" So, we get into these descriptions. I think it's rare that it just really works. Michael Jackson manufactured "King of Pop," and believe me, we were trying to talk him out of it.

Carl: Why did you try to talk him out of it?

Dan: Well, our feeling was that radio was going to just roll their eyes and say, "Screw you!"

This was around the time of Dangerous, the late '80s and beginning of the '90s, and here was a guy that the tabloids were starting to talk about his skin color, they were starting to talk about the plastic surgery and the Elephant Man and the hyperbaric chamber – I guess those were probably the first four aspects of Michael starting to take hits in the media.

A lot of people in the media were unhappy with Michael because he didn't talk to them and Frank DiLeo [Jackson's manager] essentially kept him away from the press, I think with good reason because Michael only had so much to say and he also was a very vulnerable guy. He wasn't media savvy in the way of sitting down with a journalist and really having that engaging conversation. He was just too much in a bubble.

Frank kept him away, so with all the success that he had there were some media people who were very frustrated that they couldn't talk to him. So, when things started to crack and there were more odd entities in his life, it started to turn negative.

Well, now, Michael starts to evolve the idea of "King of Pop" and he passes that along to his new manager, Sandy Gallin, who starts presenting this idea that we're going to call Michael "King of Pop." At Epic, we were saying, "Sandy, stop, please. This is going to hurt him and we could have people turn against us."

Were we over-concerned? Probably. We were all trying to make our own lives simpler. In the meantime, if you look back on the whole thing, he did become "King of Pop." I guess in immortality he established it and maybe he was working on that while he was alive.

Carl: Yeah, and Michael Jackson's an artist that you don't need to have out there promoting his new album because it's a news event in and of itself, but most artists aren't like that. And some artists will promote themselves relentlessly, which in the '80s and '90s was this dog and pony show where you'd have to go to all the radio stations and play their silly events and do the meet-and-greets. The Barenaked Ladies would suck it up and do it, hit every town, whereas other acts would just have complete disdain for this [remember the Primitive Radio Gods?]. Did you encounter any acts that were one way or the other and see how it affected their careers?

Dan: Well, we encouraged artists to get involved, to do the stuff they needed to do to ingratiate themselves with the market. You didn't want an act to be out there begging, since that was a bad image. But a hardworking act that knew how to say thank you and was interesting to speak with was a huge plus. We would sit down and evaluate the pros and cons of an artist. We certainly worked with acts who weren't good interviews or weren't good live: "Let's make a great video and keep them off the road!"

We think of Living Colour breaking from the "Cult of Personality" video on MTV. We actually shot a video before that [for "Middle Man"] which floundered, and the band went on the road and built enough momentum going that I was able to go back in and ask my boss if we could try doing another video. So, it was their live thing that actually saved us in terms of marketing, and the video exploded but the fact was it was the band playing New Haven and Albany and Poughkeepsie – that's why the band succeeded.

So, it was really looking for that "thing." Some acts in the meet-and-greets would just overwhelm people with how good they were at it, so we'd do that in every city we could.

Carl: What are some of these acts that were killer in meet-and-greets?

Dan: Cyndi Lauper was phenomenal at it. Stevie Ray Vaughan, you had to be very careful because he had some issues. A great guy but he had issues and also was a bit shy. You have to respond to people by who they are and what their personalities are.

So, somebody like Cyndi you could put in a lot of situations. I took her to the National Record Mart sales convention and she jumps on stage with k.d. lang. Cyndi didn't know kd – they met for like two seconds, and they jumped on stage and sang "I Fall To Pieces" together. They just tore the house down.

Carl: What were the acts you had to protect because they weren't good live?

Dan: It was usually the kind of one-and-done hit single acts. We had people like Will to Power, and it was like, "OK, it sounds good on the radio but where's this going to go as a career?"

Carl: Yeah. I couldn't tell you what any of those band members look like, or their names. What do you do when you're a record company and you have this song that radio's going to absorb but there's no interest in the act itself?

Dan: When you look at these big companies, it's all heat seeking for revenue, and revenue also is dealing with the cost. So, what is our cost to take this further? Michael Caplan signed The Allman Brothers in the latter stages of their career and released the song "Seven Turns," which was great. To get that song on the charts meant tremendous album sales because when people heard the song and liked it, they'd go out and buy the new Allman Brothers album. But then you could have one of these pop situations where you'd have a #1 single but you wouldn't sell any album product.

So, a lot of times it was an argument in the company. Promotion didn't want to have mid-chart records because they felt vulnerable to being accused of not getting it further, so sometimes you're saying, "Don't worry, we're not going to yell at you for mid-charting but if you can get this song another 15 spots up the charts we'll probably sell another 200,000 records."

A lot of the criticism of major labels is the "big thing," but that big thing is really hundreds of people and it is an amalgam. You hear complaints about the Grammys. Well, NARAS isn't one person, it's 18,000 people – everything from a country banjo player to metal bands and hip-hop kids. So, it's not one thing. It's easy to say NARAS sucks and they got the nominations wrong, but there's so many battles that go on internally for priority. Everyone wants their band to be the priority.

As head of marketing, I used to tell product managers at Epic, "You're not going to go in and convince the promotion department that your band should be the number one priority. The only person that's going to tell promotion who the number one priority is is the head of the record label."

What you have to do is establish your act underneath with the assistants, with the field staff. You can build something underneath it – interest and momentum – that then gives the promotion departmen
t the kind of confidence and encouragement to say, "Hey, maybe we can get this on the radio." Oftentimes, that's the way bands were built.

If you look at Bruce Springsteen, that's another era but it took three albums to break him. I think early on they were very careful about how they approached radio because they didn't want to push him so hard that they couldn't come back. Sometimes you had to be really careful about these things, and acts need to happen as the momentum is right. That's a lot of what we were trying to do.

Carl: Yeah, and it is very interesting. I'm just fascinated by the Will to Power, Exposé kind of thing where you can get the songs on the radio, people are going to like them, they're not objectionable, but nobody will ever know who is in the band and the record company probably doesn't care, since the songs are getting eaten up by radio.

Dan: And at every record company, those slots to have your promotion department focus on something means they're not focusing on something else. Let's say it's an act that has gone Gold eight times beforehand. Well, the finance people have budgeted that album to sell X amount, and if you don't sell it you have underachieved, so there's a whole lot about protecting the stars. So if you have a star that's struggling on the radio, it backs up everything.

Now, if you have a star go on the radio and it explodes further, it drags everything else forward. All of a sudden you're at radio and they're saying, "Can I get them for an interview?" And you're saying, "Have you heard my other two records?"

Success really does breed success and momentum and you see a lot of cycles where a company gets really hot, and that's because their hits drag more hits, and it creates room for them because if you have an explosive hit you don't really have to work it. All you're doing is managing the time frame and figuring out the right moment to drop the next single and how else to dimensionalize the project.

Carl: It's almost a cliché how the record companies ruin lives and make musicians sign bad contracts. How predatory are the labels really?

Dan: It's like sports. If you're a rookie on the baseball team, you're going to sign a $400,000 contract. And then you hit .310 and they renegotiate your deal. That to me, ultimately, is how the record businesses work: You're paid on past success. So if you explode, all of a sudden everything you signed doesn't matter – you re-sign.

It's a leverage business and I've been on both sides of it, working at the labels and as a manager, and if you have no leverage, you have no leverage. When you walk in the door and you know you have no leverage other than the music that you've made, then you're betting that you can create the leverage. So, yeah, it's a gamble for talent. Hey, artists are entrepreneurs and it takes courage to be an artist.

What is a record company? A record company sells these little round things and they're a bank. We can all say they're the bad guys, but they are holding the cards – they're the casino. And the fact is, if you can push the right buttons within that system, they will make you a multi-millionaire and make your career. So, they are a gateway.

Today, it's for fewer acts. There is a healthier potential as an indie artist today, but I think it's harder than ever to be an artist because you have to do more things. There's more traffic, there's more distractions, it's just very, very hard. And the major labels, for some people, are an opportunity. For others they could be a negative stop on the way.

Some of the accounting practices and some of the traditional language in those contracts, it's institutional. Doesn't make it right, but it's in the system. We have much more informed young people in the business, and there are opportunities to be an indie artist, so it's just a matter of what you want. I think everybody has to first say, I'm going to be an independent artist. If that other opportunity comes up, then it's one to be evaluated. What's my risk, what's my reward if I do this?

January 8, 2016.
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Carl Wiser was a disc jockey in Hartford, Connecticut when he founded Songfacts as a way to tell the stories behind the songs. You can also find him on

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