The eager diva
Two sips into my glass of pink Cristal and I am beginning to worry that this may not work. I have come to Mariah Carey's suite in Claridge's to talk business. So far I have mostly got diva. Carey has sold over 150m albums - more than anyone but Elvis and the Beatles. The idea was to find out what commercial lessons someone who has made an estimated $300m fortune from her five-octave voice could offer readers of the FT.
In a business that measures market share by the weekly charts, Mariah Carey counts as a blockbuster global product. In 1990, her eponymous debut album made her a household name from New Jersey to Japan. Bought and sold by three of the world's four largest music companies since then, she is a brand into which millions of dollars have been invested, and which - sometimes - has returned millions more. She is also among a celebrity elite upon which the newspaper, magazine and television industries lean ever more heavily.
Yet four years ago, brand Mariah was looking seriously tarnished. Her first foray into acting, a film called Glitter, had been panned by the critics and ignored by the public. The accompanying soundtrack albums had sold just 2m copies - a tenth of what she had sold at her peak. With the tabloid press turning on her after a couple of eccentric public appearances, she collapsed exhausted on the floor of her mother's kitchen. And then, in January 2002, EMI paid an unheard-of $28m to get out of the contract it had signed with her only a year before.
I have come to her London hotel to find out how an asset that had been so expensively written off could become so valuable again. This year, she has staged one of the most remarkable brand comebacks in marketing history. Her last album, The Emancipation of Mimi, has already sold 7.2m copies, spawning a series of chart-topping singles and earning her armfuls of industry awards, culminating in eight Grammy nominations this month.
I am kept waiting for 45 minutes, hovering in a low-lit bedroom scattered with Jimmy Choo shopping bags and abandoned room service trolleys. There are occasional bursts of laughter from next door and an aide darts in and out, ferrying an unexplained pack of Wet Ones Family Wipes. Finally, I am admitted and find Carey curled in a corner of the couch, playing with her hair, lit only by a lamp on the other side of the room. An iPod is playing through speakers on the mantelpiece.
Carey is wearing brown suede boots over designer jeans, a gauzy blouse over a boob tube and a string of beads. I am the man from the FT and am wearing a grey suit, white shirt and a tie. "I must warn you I failed math in 8th grade," she jokes as the champagne is poured, "So if we're going to deal with long division you're in the wrong place."
"You're not a regular reader of the FT, then?" I ask. "No, no, no darling, of course I read it. Is it bimonthly or... or..." It's daily, I tell her. "Right. I read it bimonthly." That settled, I start by asking what makes one record sell and another not.
"Well. It's been a really interesting journey for me," she begins, setting off on a 1,500 word spiel about her mixed-race origins; her discovery by, marriage to and divorce from Tommy Mottola, the former head of Sony's Columbia Records label; "the Glitter debacle"; her hounding by the press; and everything else that a thousand other interviewers have already picked over a thousand times. But just as I am beginning to despair, she answers the questions. What makes a record sell, she says, is that it appeals to both white and black audiences.
Carey's frequent reference to the fact that her mother is white and her late father was black is one of many tropes to which she returns throughout the interview - others being the fact that she writes all her own music, still feels like a kid of 12, and has always listened to hip-hop even when she was performing her signature ballads.
An accomplished interviewee, she seems to have a carefully-polished life story, raising all the difficult questions before you can ask them and then convincingly dismissing them. But her mixed race background has become what marketing men would call her brand key, the core of her market identity and appeal. This year, she has pulled off the remarkable feat of remaining number one on both the pop and hip-hop charts for 15 weeks with the same single, "We Belong Together".
In a business where "pop" and "hip-hop" have become euphemisms to describe white and black audiences, this is a rare phenomenon. "I can't even name a singer right now who crosses both genres because there really is a barrier," Carey says. This mixed-race appeal is as much a matter of brand positioning as genes, she says. The demo tape that was famously passed to Tommy Mottola when Carey was a teenage backing singer had plenty of urban influences, she says, but her former husband ("I can't even believe I was ever married, but, whatever") pushed the safe, mainstream pop songs.
"He said to me "We need more pop songs, we can't release your favourite song off the [1995] Daydream album, which of course was always the most R&B song, it's not acceptable to pop audiences, we're going to go with 'Forever'." This, she says dismissively, was "a pop record where I'm singing long notes and just belting out the whole time and I'm sure a lot of people enjoyed it but it's not my favourite song that I've ever written, you know what I mean?"
Her colleagues say Carey chafed at her early marketing as a white, ballad-singing diva, and was one of the first mainstream artists to record hip-hop versions of her singles for the club scene. Carey does not blame Mottola alone for her early pop positioning but argues that most music company executives are out of touch. "When I first got my record deal I was so surprised. I was, like, why are all these older people trying to tell me what's going to sell to people my age?"
Her own generation always wanted to hear "that fusion" of her voice and her urban influences, she argues: "They want to hear someone singing a ballad over a beat." She made her move into the hip-hop market after her 1997 divorce from Mottola (her divorce from his company came four years later). But her duets with the likes of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Missy Elliott seemed to coincide with the start of her commercial troubles.
By the time of her breakdown in 2001, there were plenty of critics urging her to return to safer territory. "They said 'What Mariah Carey needs to do is go back to wearing long gowns, be covered up and have some great writers write some songs for her and produce some records for her and do ballads.' "
But Carey argues that she is simply moving with her market and adds that there are demographic trends supporting her brand's new positioning. "When I was growing up there were no biracial role models," she says. "I think what I represent is a new generation. Eventually, everybody's going to be mixed." It is a point that is too often lost on companies beyond the music industry, she adds. "I should be there as a person when they're looking at an ad campaign with a blonde, blue-eyed girl and a dark-skinned, beautiful black woman and an Asian woman. [Mixed-race consumers] should also be able to see a multi-racial person and know that it's OK to look that way because most of my life I felt ugly."
Now that the core Mariah Carey brand has stabilised and is growing once again, she believes the time is ripe for some brand extensions. "I'm becoming more open to entrepreneurial concepts and ideas," she says. "I've been approached by a lot of people who have said 'why have you never done a hair campaign, why have you never done a skin campaign, why have you never done a soda campaign?' "
What stopped her from taking on more commercial ventures earlier in her career, she says, was that she could not understand why some other stars seemed to need "this excess of money". But she has since realised: "The more famous you become the more money you actually need." The need for time off and privacy from prying photographers means "you start to look for places that are very, very, very high end, that are very private, that are very, you know, expensive." She would be a singer "if I never made a dime from it," she insists. But her music was, from the start, also "a way out, and a way to not be struggling and not to be in fear of the rug being pulled out from under me".
For many high performers, in music or in finance, money is also a way of keeping score. If this is her motivation, then Carey hides it well but she is acutely aware of her competition. She knows Gwen Stefani's position on the charts and her rumoured rivalry with Jennifer Lopez has long been staple fodder for the gossip columns. "Technically they're competition, in terms of charts," she says, before elaborating how none of them has been through the experiences that she has.
When she mentions Glitter's poor showing at the box office, she casually points out that Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson's film, Get Rich or Die Trying, "debuted lower than Glitter and made less money, I believe". Jackson is the only artist ahead of her in the race for bestselling album of the year in the US.
Benny Medina, Carey's manager, says: "I know Mariah doesn't look at other female releases in a competitive way but I do. There is only so much space on music video channels, and radio stations are so test-driven and researched. There is only so much room for a particular style of music or a particular gender."
Medina, who has also represented Lopez, says Carey has an unparalleled knowledge of music business issues, tracking airplay and the weekly Soundscan sales figures and understanding the importance of international marketing. "It's innate to her upbringing as someone who started in the business as a 19- or 20-year-old. That's spilled over into an attention to detail in everything else she does."
Other colleagues say that being married to Mottola gave Carey a unique perspective on the industry at a very early age. "She's almost like a manager herself," adds Jason Iley, UK managing director of Universal Music's Mercury Records label. Just as Carey likes to keep on top of the competition, she also keeps a close eye on the people who are positioning and selling her brand. "Even with the big companies you have to watch them and micromanage and it's difficult," she says. Carey's unceremonious exit from EMI's Virgin Records in 2002 may have forced the group to make an announcement to the London Stock Exchange but it is skipped over in her official biography. "Always at the top of her game, the ever thriving Carey sparked the interest of the Universal Music Group's Island Def Jam records," the press pack says.
In person, she is less coy. "The contract that I got [from EMI] was out of this world ridiculous, which is why I went with them." Both sides are constrained by confidentiality agreements from discussing the deal, which was rumoured to be worth between $75m and $100m. Many executives believe EMI did the right thing in writing off the deal as the terms were so generous it would have struggled to make the money back even with a hit such as The Emancipation of Mimi.
Carey disagrees, saying she would be "kicking myself right now" if she were an EMI executive "but that's their loss". So where did EMI go wrong? The answer, she says, is that they over-worked her by rushing to produce albums to recoup their vast outlay. Furthermore, "they underestimated my talent, and I say that in the most humble way because my talent is a gift from God." If she felt unappreciated at EMI, and squashed at Sony before that, she has nothing but praise for Universal Music.
The story of Carey's move to Universal is a case study in how to rescue what Unilever or Procter & Gamble would call an orphan brand. Once she had been dropped by EMI, Universal launched a charm offensive worthy of its Gallic ownership. Doug Morris, Universal's chairman and chief executive, flew Carey to Deauville in Normandy for a meeting of Vivendi Universal executives, led by the parent company's megalomaniac former chief executive Jean-Marie Messier. She was introduced to executive after executive and told how Universal would - as a press release later put it - "handle the comprehensive coordination of Ms Carey across a variety of Vivendi Universal's print, television, film and online marketing brands".
While other executives were still trying to coax her away, Morris sealed the deal with a house call. "He came to my apartment and he brought me some champagne and said 'here's what we're going to celebrate with when you win all the awards'."
"I just thought this woman has not even started her career," Morris says. "She's determined to be the absolute number one singer in the world and she is. But here's the thing - she doesn't take it for granted." The wooing worked. But Carey, who has seen plenty of chief executives in her career, says the clincher was the management team Morris had to offer: "Doug Morris is the best executive in the business and he knows how to hire the best executives."
If Morris is credited with spotting Carey's potential at a low point and signing a deal that her manager admits was "less than what the market would have suggested", he gets more credit for having made Antonio "LA" Reid chairman of Island Def Jam, the Universal label to which Carey had signed. Reid, who was also at a low ebb having been forced out by BMG, Bertelsmann's music division, joined Universal early last year. "A true musician like LA Reid is a gold mine for a company and a godsend for me," she says.
On Charmbracelet, Carey's 2002 album, she admits she listened to the critics who wanted her to return to the pop mainstream."I did it for a second and it kind of didn't really work," she says. A change of producer made all the difference. John Kennedy, chairman of the IFPI, the music industry's lobby group, says: "I've been in the business for 25 years and if somebody had said that Mariah Carey would sell a million albums this year I'd have said 'you're mad'. But it's all about who makes the record. Sometimes it takes a setback for artists to do something and get help."
Reid endorsed Carey's hip-hop leanings and paired her with urban singers and co-producers such as Nelly, Snoop Dogg, and Jermaine Dupri. She and Reid "clicked immediately because he wasn't trying to make me into something I wasn't," Carey says, and they ended the year side by side on the cover of Billboard magazine, the music industry bible in the US, celebrating their joint comeback.
But if the sleeve notes for The Emancipation of Mimi lead off on a dictionary definition of the long word in the title, why does a woman who claims to be embracing her independence still need to be part of a huge corporation? The answer is globalisation. "There's a certain thing about being a global artist that requires you to be aware of your sales in every country on the planet," she says.
"A lot of my friends who never used to think about that are starting to realise, hey it's not just America, and I was like that too. I was like - New York, that's the end of the world! And then I started realising how much of my sales were coming from outside America." She adds: "Right now I don't feel like I'm in a place where I would want to be just distributing my own stuff on the internet. I know the percentages are way better, but I feel like the support system that I have is priceless."
Carey has little time for the big music companies' complaints about what the internet has done to their business models. File sharing and illegal downloads may have cut CD sales by nearly a quarter in the past five years but Carey says sternly: "If the labels would have been less greedy at the beginning, they would not be dealing with this now. So I blame them, I'm sorry."
Instead, and with the backing of Universal, she has provided a lesson in what new technologies will allow. Carey may have attracted unwelcome press for the rambling messages she left on her website in 2001 but she has used the internet cannily to engage her fans. "I think you have to work with the technology in order to create new ways to actually want to buy the actual DVD, the actual CD," she says. In November, just six months after her album came out, she re-issued it in an "ultra platinum edition" with four extra tracks, a DVD and web links.
Such lavish marketing, and the hordes of artists crammed on the videos, have earned urban music a reputation for terrible economics. The tales of Carey flying her dog around the world, her vast entourage and the pictures of aides holding up glasses with straws so she need not even pick up her own drink raise further questions about the economics of her fame.
How, I ask, does this all stack up? She pauses and answers seriously: "To me, if we're going to use the word diva - I'm using it in terms of a female vocalist who requires certain things - to be a diva at the high end of divas requires a certain element of you've got to spend money to make money."
After the success of her latest album, I venture that Carey will be in a pretty strong negotiating position when her contract comes up for negotiation, which is thought to be after one more record. "You know what? Maybe you're right!" she laughs. So what advice does the bestselling woman in music have to offer FT readers about her investment strategy?
"You know, I've always had a poor girl's mentality, which is keep it in the bank. That kind of comes from when you don't grow up with money you want to feel safe, although we all know that it's not safe." She calls her accountant, she says, but not as much as she should. "So if there's anybody out there reading this and they're a fabulous financial adviser, please call me!" (Financial Times)
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