Few crying the blues for Mariah Carey
"Poor Mariah" is not the sentiment that is sweeping the music industry over the news that EMI Records bought out its $80 million contract with the pop diva Mariah Carey. "It's a huge windfall for her," said Danny Hayes, a lawyer who represents the rock groups Tool and Linkin Park. "She gets $28 million, walks away from a huge unrecouped balance and gets to start over." The unrecouped balance covers what the company would have deducted from Ms. Carey for expenses of recording and promoting her last album, "Glitter".
Beyond the money, many music executives said that EMI's decision might in the long run benefit Ms. Carey's career, which they described as far from over. Though it is easy to assume that a label drops an artist because its executives think the performer's star is on the wane, this is not always so. In Ms. Carey's case, her departure from EMI is in no small part a result of two divergent ways of operating in the music business. Some companies and executives focus on the music and others focus on the business - some concentrate primarily on helping artists create the perfect hit song, and others organize a label as a marketing machine.
Ms. Carey built her career with close artistic and personal relationships with executives, and then suddenly found herself at a label able to market her but perhaps less able to manage her both musically and personally. Referring to Ken Berry, the EMI chief executive who signed Ms. Carey and has since departed, Allen Kovac, a top music manager, said: "The person who made the deal had a Rolodex that included MTV and Billboard. He was a marketing person. But the person she needs to make a deal with is someone who has a Rolodex of producers and songwriters."
Even before Ms. Carey's arrival last year, the EMI label that signed her, Virgin Records, had a reputation for overpaying to sign venerable stars, known as legacy acts, like the Rolling Stones and David Bowie, but failing to rehabilitate their careers. Mr. Bowie, for example, left Virgin/ EMI recently to start his own label, citing the "slow and lumbering" pace there. "I don't think it was a one-way decision," Mr. Kovac said of Ms. Carey's departure. "It was a two-way street."
But others said that whatever Ms. Carey's motives, EMI initiated the move and the bottom line was savings. "I think it's an EMI-driven thing, and a way to get money off the books," said a lawyer who has dealings with EMI and spoke only on condition of anonymity. From a financial perspective, most music executives agree that Alain Levy, the new chief executive of EMI, made the right decision on Ms. Carey's contract, considering the size of it, the expense of marketing a star of her stature and the difficulty of working with the notoriously high-strung diva.
But this does not mean that it was a good move from a larger perspective, they said. In the future, one leading music executive said, other superstars may hesitate to sign with a label that could offer a multimillion-dollar contract one day and work to get out of it soon after. "It was too aggressive, too cold and too nonmusical," the executive said. (When superstars sign deals like Ms. Carey's that are said to be worth many millions, the figure given is usually the maximum the stars could earn over the course of several extremely successful albums without expenses removed.)
In general, record executives split into two types: the cost-cutters, book-balancers and bottom-line people, who run record companies as they would other major international businesses, and the music people, an increasingly rare breed that spends more time working hands-on with pop stars, trying to team them up with the right songwriters, producers and collaborators.
Clive Davis, whose label, J Records, competed with Virgin for the Mariah Carey deal, is an example of the music people and his is among the labels said to be considering signing Ms. Carey now. Other labels that might be able to resuscitate Ms. Carey's career include Def Jam, Jive and Arista, all of which are run by executives who are knowledgeable both on the music and the marketing side of pop R&B (news/quote) music.
Ms. Carey's formula before releasing her only EMI album, "Glitter", was developed by music-minded executives. Her strategy in the last few years was to mix her ballads, dance numbers and makeovers with collaborations with top-selling rappers who claim greater street credibility. These have included Jay-Z, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Mystikal and Missy Elliott. Though "Glitter", a soundtrack album, and the accompanying movie were widely perceived as failures, both commercially and artistically, that did not necessarily mean that Ms. Carey's commercial days had come to an end. Soundtrack albums are generally not indicative of a pop star's future. The soundtrack and movie of Madonna's "Who's That Girl" were widely seen as bombs in 1987, but her next album, "Like a Prayer", went to No. 1 for six weeks.
Similarly, when Garth Brooks flopped two years ago with an album in which he assumed the identity of a rock star he was to play in a forthcoming movie, some pundits saw a career on the rocks. But he was No. 1 on the charts again late last year with "Scarecrow". "There's no doubt she'll get signed again, and the odds are in her favor that she'll have another hit," Mr. Hayes, the lawyer, said of Ms. Carey. "The public doesn't care about this. This is industry scuttlebutt. All the public cares about is whether she has a good song or not."
For other artists, though, the cancellation of Ms. Carey's contract may harden their resolve to gain greater control over their contractual relationships with recording companies. Performers like Don Henley and Sheryl Crow were in Sacramento on Wednesday lobbying the California legislature to include musicians in a labor code that allows entertainers to free themselves from contracts after seven years. (The New York Times)
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