From Corporate Rock Player to Underground Tech Genius

Ben Morgan

11.15.1999

J : Who are you, Ben, and what's your relationship (or past relationships) to music and the independent music/technology communities?

B : Well, at the heart of things I'm a big music fan and a musician. I've worked a variety of music industry jobs over the years but gave up on working in the music business a few years ago when I realized I couldn't reconcile my love for music and respect for artists with how they are treated by the companies that sell their products.

I went to high school in Portland, Oregon in the early nineties when there was a really strong local all-ages punk/indie scene going on, and I developed a real strong love for live rock music and the people involved who were actively putting out records and creating a community. I moved to Philadelphia in 1993 to attend the University of Pennsylvania, and started DJ-ing at college radio and working on the station board, and started playing bass in a band. This led to East/West Records hiring me as a College Marketing Rep in 1994. Though coming from a strong D.I.Y. and "anti-corporate rock" scene in Portland, I was curious about the music business and the allure of free CDs, tickets. Also, meeting musicians that I idolized was too alluring to resist.

Since I enjoyed talking about music and learning about the music industry, I was really happy with my job and the opportunities it gave me. I was meeting people in the music industry and artists a lot, getting free stuff all the time, and working really hard promoting the label's artists. East/West was a pretty small part of the Time-Warner family, and the artists they had me promoting when I started were the Dambuilders, Buffalo Tom, and the Dentists. I actually respected and believed in the artists I was working. It was a great job to have as a 17 year-old who loved music.

East/West merged with Elektra not long after I had been hired, so I found myself working with some artists I really admired - **Stereolab**, Luna, Bjork, Afghan Whigs, Kim Deal, Scrawl. Even though I thought some artists I had to promote were pretty cheesy, I didn't mind the balance. I worked hard and had a great relationship with my boss, who, at that time was the national college radio promotion and is now a VP of promotion at Arista. He invited me to work as a paid intern in Manhattan at the Elektra offices in the Time/Warner building in the summer in 1995. Being in the right place at the right time I found myself working as an assistant to two national promotion people when their assistant unexpectedly quit. I was 18 living in Manhattan, working an entry-level job in national radio promo, meeting lots of artists whom I admired, getting invited to parties and events. I was getting fed and drinking for free on people's expense accounts. I felt like I was in heaven that summer, and I was definitely on the way to a career in the corporate music industry.

But then I started getting to know some of the artists really well. I was also getting to know people in other departments at the label, and they started to open my eyes about what kinds of things the industry did to artists. Terry Tolkien signed a good majority of the labelês roster and I became friends with him. He was the first to explain to me about how record contracts work and how artists get screwed by recoupable budgets. You need to let the label spend money in order to have a hit, but if you do that then you don't actually make any money. He got disgusted with Elektra after the merger and stopped coming into work. He was a big influence on me there and that had a significant effect on my opinion of the label. My other best friend there was Valerie Vickers, an A&R person who had just signed her first band (Clouds). Valerie worked harder than anyone else I knew there. They canned her when The Clouds album didn't go anywhere, even though she was the easiest person to get along with in the world. Her band really wasn't necessarily any worse from an aesthetic standpoint than artists like Better than Ezra who were getting all the attention and sales - it was just a matter of The Clouds not being a priority with the promo/marketing people. I also started having weird experiences with label artists like Kim Deal who would immediately treat me rudely upon learning that I worked for Elektra.

I started to see how label politics and money decided what got on the radio and what sold albums. It had nothing to do with how hard the artist worked or what they were trying to do musically. It was all relationships and image - powerful managers and lawyers pulling favors, watching the market closely and giving it what the label thought it wanted. If the label-headsê impression of the market changed in the time between signing an artist and the release of their record, the artists were screwed. I also started to see how the money these labels had kept them in control of radio and shelf space in big record stores.

I saw bands work their asses off and get dropped before they even had a shot. One artist I met and really liked worked for half a year recording an album that I thought was fantastic. The label thought it wasn't commercially viable so they dropped him without even releasing the record. Since the label paid for the record, anyone wanting to release it had to buy it from them, and it was never released. I met him for a beer after a day at work and he asked me why I was in the record business. I told him I liked being around music. I told him that I really liked a lot of the artists and was enjoying the shows and parties, the free drinks, all that. That's when he told me how those expense accounts that were buying me lunch every day were eventually tallied to an artist's recoupable promo budget. I was literally drinking an artist's profits away. That shocked me - when I thought about it later it seemed obvious. I guess I had always thought of money the label spent as being "the label's" money, not the artists'.

I saw plenty of hard-working bands get dropped that were developing good cult followings - the label had no patience - the pressure to have a hit was tremendous. When I started to see that having a hit was really a question of spending money on promo to get that hit, I started to see that the label really created the "problem". The only way to win was to drop a ton of money into the promotion of a record, thus pissing away any hope of making money back.

And on the other side, I saw bands like Better than Ezra and Third Eye Blind get huge due to the promotion department making them priorities. I started to see the connection between the amount of money spent on a project and how independent promoters could guarantee a chart position if you paid them enough.

My illusion that programmers would pick playlists based on the merits of the song or "listener call-in reaction" started to fade and I started to see the power the labels had to get things on the radio. "Add the new Kyuss this week and we'll have Metallica stop by your station for an exclusive interview when they tour...We'd like to do a contest with you where we'll fly the winners to Hawaii." My illusion that this was corporate money being spent had been replaced by the realization that it was the sweat and blood of the artists paying for the birthday present for the music director of KROQ.

When I started to make these observations I would discuss them with friends who were fully embracing their music business career paths. Their excuse was always "But that's the way the world is - money runs things. It's no different here than at any other corporate job. And it's a lot more fun to work here." For a while I accepted this, but my second summer in Manhattan most of the people whom I had looked up to at Elektra were gone. I started to become a really bitter. I think I finally lost it when after two years of working for Sylvia Rhone's company I rode up with her in the elevator, explained who I was, and asked if I could meet with her before I left that summer to talk about my future with the company. She smiled and said sure, but I never got past her assistant the rest of the summer. I burned out at 19.

I left my job with Elektra after two years to go to Germany to study abroad. I started playing with musicians there who were recording things in their bedrooms and releasing them themselves or with friends who had small labels. It wasn't a new concept to me, since I had long been into local music, but the music they were making was electronic. Using relatively inexpensive technology they did EVERYTHING themselves - great sounding recordings, mastering, getting it pressed, and distributing it. Plus this time I was directly involved as an artist.

When I came back to the states I started to concentrate more on making music. I met someone in Brooklyn who wanted to start a label and he put out a CD of my German band, Bergheim 34. He used independent distributors and with very little promotion and a few good unsolicited press reviews we sold nearly all of the 1,000 copies. The band came over and we toured. It was great - we were paid with 200 CDs and didn't make any money, but for the amount of promotion put into it I was amazed at the results. I saw that releasing a record that was picked up by a good credible indie distributor like Forced Exposure was the best promotion possible for an independent artist, and that a good-quality CD could in fact sell itself without dropping cash into promotion and marketing.

I was in my last year of school and as a result of my experience with Elektra, was offered another College Marketing job with Wasabi distribution. Wasabi was an experiment BMG was doing where they used about 7 of the better independent distributors to carry releases and develop an artist's credibility. It was an intriguing concept and I liked it, but eventually BMG higher-ups pressured Wasabi into carrying too many releases that weren't very good. It started to become too similar to my experience at Elektra. I saw how distribution was truly a scarcity, and the main obstacle to overcome when trying to get a record out there to the public.

Later, I had an amazing experience at the CMJ conference in Fall 1997 - we met with the VP of Sales and someone asked what BMG's future plans with regards to the Internet were. He said, "We don't have any plans. We're just watching it - we think people will always want a physical product." I couldn't believe that they didn't take the net very seriously at that point.
When I graduated my old boss at Elektra got me an interview for an entry-level promo job in Manhattan. In the interview the first thing I said was "I put over two years of my life into this department, and I know I'm qualified for this job - I want you to tell me why I should take it." Needless to say, I wasn't offered the job, but that was probably the most satisfying experience I had there.

I was playing in a band in Philly and was starting to get good gigs, so I stayed there. My first job out of school was at CDNow, which had gone public a few months before and was changing at an amazing rate. It was hard to get hired there - a lot of qualified people wanted to get in with them. I took a job there in brand marketing to get my foot in the door. It was a job that didn't involve the music end of things at all. I was only there four months before my boss and I both agreed that I wasn't suited for the position. When I tried to transfer to another department they began to merge with Music Boulevard/N2K and they let me go. It was bad timing and I had liked the company, but it turned out to be the best thing for me. I like where I am now a lot more and have heard that the corporate mergers have really made CDNow a lot less friendly of a place to work. The four months I spent there were amazing, though. I saw just how fast things were changing, and started to see possibilities that people outside the power structure were taking advantage of. I started to see that the corporate labels weren't planning ahead at all, and that the technology was creating opportunities for other people to start doing new things involving music. Most of all, I saw that people were coming up with new ideas all over the place, and things that had seemed like science fiction were actually starting to be developed.

Soon after that, I got my current job working with friends from school at small Internet services company. I started answering customer service email and now I work with domain hosting and mailing lists. It is a totally non-corporate environment which has further influenced my belief that corporations are really terrible to work for. I am able to play music and go on tour when I want, and I can use the computer resources at work for my own projects.

However, I understood that things are changing really rapidly in the music business. I would like to work with music again in a capacity where I don't feel like I am ripping off the artists. That's kinda where musictech comes in.

home | manifesto | resources | press & news | events | FAQs | subscribe | contact us