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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
When he was a teen-ager, growing up in New York City in the nineteen-seventies, Jason Flom wrote songs, sang, and played guitar for two rock bands, which he named Relative Pleasure and Selective Service. But Flom's dreams of rock stardom ended around the time he started working at Atlantic Records, in 1979, when he was nineteen, and began redirecting his energies into making other people stars. Now forty-two, he is one of the most successful record men of the past twenty years, scoring hits in genres as varied as heavy metal (Twisted Sister), Celtic pop (the Corrs), and rock (Matchbox 20, Sugar Ray). Altogether, his artists have sold more than a hundred million CDs.
In an era when many of the top-selling acts have "flava"--the edgy sound of hip-hop artists and R. & B. singers and rap-metal groups, who emerge from niches and achieve broad recognition--Flom has continued to have success with pop music, that sweet, beguiling, never-too-challenging sound which has been a record industry staple from Bing Crosby to Doris Day to Britney Spears. Flom's specialty is delivering "monsters"--records that sell millions of copies and become rainmakers for everyone else in the record business, because they bring fans into the music stores. Successful record men are commonly said to have "ears," but prospecting for monsters requires eyes for star quality as well as a nose for the next trend. You have to be able to go to thousands of sweaty night clubs, and sit through a dozen office auditions each week, and somehow not become so jaded that you fail to recognize a superstar when you encounter one. Like the night in 1981 when Clive Davis, then the head of Arista Records, happened to go to a New York supper club and hear a nineteen-year-old gospel singer who was Dionne Warwick's cousin--Whitney Houston. Or the day when Bruce Lundvall, the head of Blue Note Records, had a routine office audition from a singer recommended by an employee in the accounting department--Norah Jones. Or the time in 1997 when Flom met Kid Rock, then an obscure m.c. who had made a couple of records that "stiffed" (sold poorly), in the basement of a Detroit disco at two-thirty in the morning. It is necessary to recognize that ineffable quality a great pop star communicates (Flom calls it "the thing"), but it isn't always necessary to love the way the music sounds. Chris Blackwell, who founded Island Records, told me that he didn't especially like listening to U2 when he first heard them play, in the early nineteen-eighties, but "I could see that they had something," and so he signed them to his label.
Why should the latent capacity for superstardom in pop, which is perhaps the most egalitarian of art forms, be obvious to only a gifted few like Jason Flom--those great A. & R. (artist-and-repertoire) men whom the record industry celebrates as its heroes? (And they are invariably male.) After all, even the great record men are wrong much more often than they are right about the acts they sign (nine misses for each hit is said to be the industry standard). One wonders how much of the art of hit-making is just dumb luck. Scientists in Barcelona say they have created a computer-based "Hit Song Science" that picks hits much more efficiently than a human can. There's even a Web site, hitsongscience.com, where aspiring pop stars can test themselves on a hit-o-meter.
"American Idol," the popular "Star Search"-style Fox TV show, in which the viewers pick their own stars by voting over the telephone, is considered a "reality show," but the democratic process is not the way stars are actually discovered. In the record business, a few guys still determine the fare of many.
One day last October, I was sitting with Flom in his office at Atlantic, which is part of the Warner Music Group, at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, when he played me a song by a new artist he had recently signed to his label, Lava Records. (Flom began the label as a joint venture with Atlantic, and then sold his share to the company two years ago, for a reported fifty million dollars.) Lava has a roster of twenty-three artists, and Flom can afford to take "a big bet," as he puts it, on two or three new artists a year. The artist's name was Cherie, he explained, and she was a young French singer whose specialty was the sweeping pop ballad. She was a "belter," as they say in the business--one of those singers who don't hold back.
Flom often has a startled expression in his eyes, as if he were waiting for something to go wrong--a look of disappointed optimism, the feeling that anyone who makes a career out of betting on talent must routinely suffer. But today he looked positively grim as he talked about the record business. Sales of recorded music in the United States have dropped by more than a hundred million units in the past two years, falling well below seven hundred million. The eighteen-year-old Canadian singer Avril Lavigne is the idol of ten-year-old girls across the country, but her debut album, "Let's Go," sold far fewer records in its first six months (four million) than did Alanis Morissette's debut album, "Jagged Little Pill" (seven million), which was released in 1995. Around the globe, the record business is sixteen per cent smaller than it was in 2000. Record labels blame the fans, for lacking the long-term loyalty to pop acts which record buyers used to have, and for engaging in wholesale "piracy" of music, either by copying CDs or by downloading music illegally from the Internet. "There is no precedent for what's happening now in the music business," Flom said. "What would happen if groceries suddenly became free, or hotels--do you think those businesses would survive?"
However, Flom brightened at the prospect of playing Cherie's demo CD. "I guess you'd call her a diva," he said. "She's seventeen, and she's classically trained, but she sings these pop ballads--and she is phenomenal." He was excitedly hunting for the demo amid the stacks of disks that cover every surface in his office. "I honestly believe she is one of the most important artists I've ever signed." Seeing the skeptical look on my face--a French pop star?--Flom quickly said, "She's also Jewish, and there aren't too many of them left in France, if you know what I mean, so it's a little different from being just French. And," he added, "she doesn't sound French when she sings."
Flom lacks the star quality that he divines in other people. He is neither tall nor physically imposing, and he seems more like a laid-back lawyer than like a record man (his father is Joseph Flom, a patriarch of the New York law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom). He is a friend of Bill Clinton's, and a generous supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union. He is not wild and crazy, although his office, like the offices of most record executives, is full of photographs of him posing with wild and crazy guys such as Kid Rock, who usually has his middle finger extended in the picture. During the nineteen-eighties, Flom tried living like a rock star, but when he was twenty-eight he checked into the Hazelden clinic, in Minnesota, for thirty days of rehab, and he hasn't had a drink or a line since. Now he lives with his wife and their two kids on the Upper West Side.
He had never heard Cherie sing before she and her manager, Jeff Haddad, turned up in his office the previous February, on Valentine's Day, for an audition. Haddad had given Flom his pitch, which, Haddad told me later, included this question: "There are maybe twenty people in the world who can deliver a song the way Faith Hill sings the Diane Warren song that is the theme in the movie 'Pearl Harbor,' and out of those people how many can do it in four different languages?" Then Cherie performed two songs, one in French and the other in English; her only accompaniment was the noisy heating system in Flom's office. On the basis of that half-hour meeting, and Flom's gut feeling that the girl, whose real name is Cindy Almouzni, had that special quality which can move a massive amount of product, Flom signed her to a million-dollar, five-album contract, and was prepared to do everything that a major label like Warner can do to make an artist a big star--"Whatever it takes to put her over," Flom told me. He declined to say how much that would cost, but David Foster, another top hitmaker with Warner Music, told me, "It's basically a five-million-dollar bet. It might cost only five hundred thousand dollars to make the record, but it's so expensive to promote it. If you get on the 'Today' show, you've got to get a band together, fly everyone in and put them up, and by the time you're done it has cost you fifty thousand dollars."
Last year, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about an unknown eighteen-year-old Irish singer named Carly Hennessy, whose debut CD, from Universal, was the subject of a $2.2-million marketing campaign yet wound up selling only three hundred and seventy-eight copies in its first three months. "If that happens to me," Flom said, "a lot of people are going to look at me funny." For the artist, the stakes were higher. "This is her shot. It's very rare for an artist to get a buildup like this and then, if things don't go well, come back from it and reinvent herself."
The song Flom played for me that day in his office, "My Way Back Home," is a love ballad written for Cherie by the Canadian singer-songwriter Corey Hart, who has also composed songs for Celine Dion. The lyrics are solidly within the convention of self-help, which is one of the main tropes of the popular love ballad. The singer is finding her way through the darkness, and, in spite of winter storms, bitter cold, and loneliness, manages to reach high and...
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