The Art of the Twisted Deal: Corruption in Commercial Music

BRIBE

I’ve always led with my heart. It takes everything you have to live life that way.

When I first got to New York and started work as a music producer in advertising, I was shocked at the corruption. I remember listening to a track over and over again trying to hear the 15 voices singing that were on the music contract.

I was so naive.

I called up the music house thinking maybe I had the wrong mix. I was taken out to lunch where it was explained to me the voices were there, I just had to change the way I listened. What I was listening to was a ghost choir. I was working for the client, not the music house, and it seemed to me this was theft on a grand scale.

Most of those people now live on horse farms and island homes. It was a grade-A fraud scheme. It eventually killed the golden goose, which was brands agreeing to do union work using union talent. The costs of these frauds was gigantic. I’m not sure to this day how these folks justified it. I certainly took a lot of flack for pushing back on it. I was never in with the in crowd of the ad industry music houses.

It was such an opportunity. If you had talent you could use it and get paid for it. It was a wild misuse of trust to send three beautiful singers into the booth and ten ghost vocalist to the brand.

The agencies weren’t much better. I was told to go this mixer or that editor. Everybody had their hand out. Eventually, the brands caught up to it. We ended up with cost controllers and no trust. Eventually, we ended up with non-union deals and a Wild West of low fees and talent exploitation.

My sense of my job was I could use the work to support artists. I had a 15-year career before I got into advertising of working live concerts, so I had a network of world class artists to draw from. Most of those people didn’t believe me when I told them what I would pay for thirty seconds of music. I loved the feeling I was helping pay for albums and projects of these artist.

There was magic in that loops of brands and artists. I still think it’s the best work I can do, promoting artists to brands for support.

The corruption contributed to the demise of the commercial music scene. It was certainly not the only reason, but it didn’t help, and more than anything it still bothers me to this day that all this was just the way it was done. Thinking back on it, I see it as executives exploiting artist talent. Of course, the artists were in on it. Those contracts were life changing.

The ghosts caught up with us. The entire city feels like a ghost town now. I miss those ten-session weeks, and those vibrant talent unions. I’m blessed with solid union pensions.

One of those music house producers once said to me I was not committed to music, but I think it’s the opposite. I see artistic talent as a scared gift. Honestly, I never fully committed to the life of shilling wares with my art. I certainly did it, I just never took it seriously. It was always a means to an end for me, and that end has never changed since I was a kid.

Lead the most creative life you can. Do good work with your art. Uplift hearts with your art. I took the pay, sure, and did well, yes, but to me it was always the same goal—how to use these opportunities to build art.

At the time, advertising seemed like everything, but in the end it was just a stop on my personal artistic journey. I had a long career before my ad work, and a long career after it. The pulse has never changed.

As an entrepreneur, the challenges I now face are off the charts. Everything has changed. Except this: Tell a good story from the heart. That hasn’t changed in 10,000 years.

But why am I writing about this now? Because of where we are, the level of corruption we are facing, and this sense that somehow it will be fixed by replacing this guy with that guy. I lived through the creation of the Art of the Twisted Deal. And where we are exactly where we have been headed for the last forty years. This is our America. We created it. And the only way to fix it is to own it.