NEW YORK, March 28 (Reuters) - What do rock acts Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, Jewel, Hanson and Hootie & The Blowfish have in common? Aside from selling tens of millions of records, all of those acts have been signed, managed or guided by Danny Goldberg.
After eight years of running his own management company and six years as the head of three different major record labels, Goldberg now runs his own label Artemis Records.
``I didn't want to get fired again,'' Goldberg quipped, when asked why he struck out on his own. ``I figured if I owned by own label, I'd have some job security.''
A victim of corporate shake-ups when he was president of Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE:TWX - news) Warner Brothers Group and Seagram Co.'s (Toronto:VO.TO - news) Mercury Records Group, he now owns 50 percent of the nine-month-old Artemis and 100 percent of the operating control.
The focus of his label is two-pronged. He courts older artists that major labels believe are past their commercial peak, such as Boston, Warren Zevon and Steve Earle, but are still capable of selling 100,000 copies.
He also seeks younger artists that have overlooked by the major labels, such as Kittie, whose album has spent 10 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 album chart.
"There are a lot of independent companies that are under-funded but are good sources (of new bands) or that can sell to niche markets. But there are incredibly few independent companies that can actually do promotion, sales and marketing.
``That's why A&M, Interscope and Def Jam and others were so dominant in the business,' he said. ''That's why Jive Records now is so successful." Jive Records' roster includes R Kelly and the Backstreet Boys.
But he also noted that the consolidation of the music industry down to four labels, amid Seagram's purchase last year of PolyGram and more recently, Warner Brothers' purchase of the EMI Records Group two months ago, created a vacuum into which a smaller label could move.
``There was this whole pasture of artists and executives that were overlooked or not important to the major companies, some of whom are really vital artistically and others who I felt we could make money with.''
He founded Gold Mountain Entertainment in 1984 where he managed such acts as Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, and Beastie Boys.
After his success with Nirvana, he joined Atlantic Records, a Time Warner subsidiary, in 1992 to shore up the label's credentials as a rock label. There, he signed such acts as Hootie & The Blowfish and Stone Temple Pilots, rising to the post of president.
In late-1994, he was named president of the higher profile Time Warner unit, Warner Brothers Records only to be fired eight months later in a spate of corporate beheadings.
In October 1995, he was named president of Mercury Records, then a unit of PolyGram NV, where he signed multi-platinum trio Hanson. He was rewarded with a promotion to chairman of the Mercury Records Group, which included responsibilities for Verve, Motown, Def Jam and other imprints.
But he lost his job in the in the wake of Seagram's takeover of PolyGram in late 1998.
Looking back, Goldberg acknowledges there are good and bad points about the majors. Major labels have the option of relying on vast catalogs of material by older artists that can be repackaged for soundtracks or greatest hits collections, he said.
Major labels also have an existing roster of unearthed talent, some of which have the potential to be stars. Goldberg also noted that the infrastructure is already in place, such as the mechanics of record production, distribution and other mundane matters like health insurance and the payment of royalties.
The downside, however, was the lack of vision major labels had. ``In the entire time that I was the head of a major label, the bosses I had never once asked me what I was going to be able to do in the next year,'' he said. ``They were only interested in what I was going to be able to do in the next quarter.''
By contrast, a smaller, privately held label has the flexibility of a longer time span for success, he said. ``This is a model that conforms to the reality of the length of time it takes to develop an artist and how to maximize what they do.''
The label started with a $30 million investment by media investor Michael Chambers, who is a non-executive co-chairman of Artemis. Since putting out its first album six months ago, the company has yielded three charting albums.
Goldberg is confident his label will be able to discover budding acts. ``When I signed Hanson at Mercury, no one else wanted them. They'd been looking for a deal for a couple of years. The same thing with Hootie & The Blowfish at Atlantic. So, as good as the majors are at spotting talent, they miss half of the big ones. So I can fish in the pond with half of the future superstars.''
One of Goldberg's latest ventures is ArtistEnt.com, a network of Web sites created by artists with songs and features created specifically for the Internet. It offers access to a Web program hosted by Peter Wolf, former lead singer of the J. Geils Band. One of its board members is songwriter, producer and longtime Internet advocate Todd Rundgren.
Nevertheless, Goldberg casts a suspicious eye on some Internet entrepreneurs, who are ``obsessed'' with the technology of the distribution of music.
"Historically, the people who understood distribution were not people that developed great music companies. The people who know how record plants work and duplication machines worked are vital parts of the machine, but they are not the leaders. The leaders were the people who found the stars and knew how to market them.
``The fact is a lot of the ideas that have been spawned on the Internet in the music space are going to fail, because the people who hatched those ideas are neither fans of music nor friends of artists,'' Goldberg said.
These investors are ``misreading the nature of what the main music business is: it is ... the relationship that fans have with a particular artist. Until you understand that the artist drives ... the music business, then you're going to fail.''
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