Glen Barros
Glen Barros’ opportunity to run Concord Music Group was almost an accident of circumstance. Barros, a veteran of independent distribution, was working for distribution giant Alliance Entertainment during the ’90s, which was growing, and in 1994 purchased Concord from its founder, Carl Jefferson. Jefferson, a former car dealer from Northern California who was also one of the founders of the Concord Jazz Festival, was supposed to stay on for a few years, but failing health forced him to step aside. As Barros and Jefferson had become close in a relatively short period of time, Jefferson asked that Alliance put Barros at the helm, and in 1995 Barros moved from New York City to California and his present position as President/CEO of Concord.
Barros’ time at Concord has not only been eventful, but also extremely successful. In a 1999 restructuring, Alliance divested itself of Concord by selling it to noted television producer Norman Lear and his partner, Hal Gaba. Since then, Concord has expanded from a purveyor of Jazz, Latin Jazz and traditional Pop by artists like Mel Torme and Rosemary Clooney, to a full service Adult music label, boasting its initial roster as well as a diverse array of talent that includes Ozomatli, Soulive, Ray Charles and John Fogerty.
The first decade of the new century has been one of even more growth for Concord, as it most notably acquired the Berkeley based Fantasy Records and that company’s impressive group of labels, as well as the respected Blues label, Telarc. Barros has also overseen the formation of a partnership with coffee giant Starbucks’ and its fledgling Hear Music label. The Starbucks alliance began somewhat as a one-off, with the 2004 release of Ray Charles’ final recording, the wildly successful Genius Loves Company. The partnership recently was solidified with an announcement heralding the official formation of a new label, Hear Music/Concord, which releases its first CD, Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full, in June.
Barros recently talked to eQB about a wide range of subjects, including the growth of Concord, the partnership with Starbucks and how to be successful in an industry that is in the midst of a constantly shifting landscape.
In the 12 years you’ve been at Concord, which – to say the least – has been a trying time for the record industry, the company’s revenue has grown twenty-fold. How have you accomplished that in this environment?
Concord was an artistically sensational label under Carl Jefferson. He did wonderful recordings, and it was his passion, his love. When I got here, success was defined by how many more records you can make this year than you made last year, and if you made enough money to finance the growth of the business. It was all about production. So the first things we did were to round out the business, adding the proper sales and marketing functions and infrastructure. The next thing was to expand genres; to grow the business outside of traditional Jazz, Pop and Latin Jazz. Not only did that make good business sense, but it is also who we are.
Then, of course, the industry hit some pretty serious times and it was very difficult to grow. Certainly that period in the late ’90s, when Alliance was going through their troubles, it was very tough to keep the doors open. So we were grateful to get out of that and find very supportive owners who saw the wisdom of owning great music and also saw that there is always going to be a fundamental demand for it.
All the changes in the marketplace are rooted in how you access the consumer, both promotionally and distribution-wise. If you can figure out a different way, there should be a very successful business model in there. So after a couple years shoring up the infrastructure, it was both organic growth and growth by acquisition, including Fantasy and Telarc.
Then we had some real big successes as our recording program started to work. The biggest success we’ve had to date was by finding an alternative channel in our partnership with Starbucks, which started with the Ray Charles Genius Loves Company record. When all those things came together, that was the quantum leap forward where we went from being a relatively small company to a much bigger one.
You mentioned doing the Ray Charles record, and one of the biggest stories in 2007 has been your recently announced full-fledged partnership with Starbucks/Hear Music, which launches with Paul McCartney’s forthcoming release, Memory Almost Full. How did that develop into what it is?
It sort of went from dating to marriage. About four years ago we first started talking about the concept for a partnership, before we even knew we were doing Genius Loves Company. There were a couple of other projects that we were considering before that, and then we finally settled on Genius as the launch. It went really well, so we continued to do projects with them along the way. We’ve always had a really good relationship and worked very closely with them. We’ve always felt that we were partners, even though there was no formal partnership.
Starbucks felt that it was the right time in their entertainment program to formally have an in-house label. Since we’ve always worked well together and we provide infrastructure, it just felt like a very natural fit. For us, we felt we could be helpful in that we understood their system, we understood who we were working with and we share similar values and perspectives musically and business-wise. The chemistry was right. Then the opportunity to work with Paul came up, and that accelerated the timing to get it all together and launch this thing.
Will every project that Starbucks is involved with also be part of the Hear Music/Concord partnership?
Starbucks Entertainment is its own entity within Starbucks, and they will still buy records from other people. They have their book program, and now, movies. We’re not a part of that. But they own half of this new label, Hear Music, and we own the other half. That is a new company that will be the exclusive label by which Starbucks and Concord sign artists to be marketed through Starbucks.
How involved are you and the Concord staff in making the A&R decisions with Hear Music people?
They are taking primary responsibility for A&R for the Hear Music label. The reason for that is because they have a really good sense for what works within Starbucks and what they think they can add value to. So, we are deferring to them in that responsibility, but the company operates as a true partnership. All the material decisions will be agreed to by both sides.
Starbucks had a reputation of developing new acts, yet the first artist in the deal is Paul McCartney, who has sold a half-billion records internationally to date. What will be the artistic focus of the partnership?
A balance. The idea is to have everything from brand new, never-released-a-record-before acts, to Paul McCartney… and also to work within multiple genres. We certainly want there to be both the discovery artist all the way up to the legacy artist, so it’s a mixed bag. The discovery component is incredibly important. Starbucks takes great pride, as does anybody that has ever got into the music business, in finding artists and being able to bring them to the world. It’s real important that that be done successfully at some point in the future.
The other very important growth element that you talked about is the acquisitions, where you bought labels like Fantasy and Telarc. Talk about the value of resurrecting these labels, dipping into their catalogue, and building a future for them.
We were always incredibly enamored with Fantasy and all that it represented. They had bought up a bunch of sensational labels, including Stax, so they had an amazing catalogue. When we bought it we saw great value in all those recordings, but there’s a bigger value than that. The value is in those brands and what we can do with those brands, and we saw different kinds of brands. The first thing we saw was the brand of John Fogerty, and the whole Creedence Clearwater Revival thing that came along with him. Trying to bring John back to those recordings and those songs in a big way made a lot of sense.
So that was the first initiative, and we were successful in building the bridge after John’s long history of disputes with Fantasy. So we got him reunited with his older material and we were able to work on his career with him. That was step one.
Step two was looking at some of the other brands, like the A Charlie Brown Christmas, which had done so well for them over the years. But there was a lot more we could do with that. We did a new 40th Anniversary version with contemporary artists. We did a special version for the U.S. Postal Service that was in 10,000 post offices last year. In the end we doubled the sales of that as a brand.
Then we systematically looked at all the Fantasy labels, trying to figure out what we can do to give them the life they deserve. Stax is really the big initiative from that Fantasy acquisition because it just means so much. We felt we had to do this right. We needed to build a bridge to the past, doing things like signing Isaac Hayes and working with him and some of the existing Stax artists, and then finding new artists that are consistent with the credibility of Stax.
Very early on you were talking about all the different ways to reach the consumer, and since we’ve moved into the digital age there are a lot of different entertainment choices and music choices. Everyday there are new challenges, but there are also new opportunities in this business. What do you see as the key to success for a record label in the 21st Century?
The key to success is to understand the end customer. You have to understand where the consumer is going, what they want and how they’re using music in their lives. We, as an industry, have done a terrible job of that because we didn’t need to do a better job. We did a terrible job of truly asking what the consumer wanted because we always relied on the next step in the chain. What is radio going to play? What is retail going to do? That’s what you were worried about.
What’s happening is the linear concept is gone. You no longer have this chain where you just go from step to step to step. We now have to really understand what it is that the end user wants, how they’re using music and how that has changed, and how important it is to them. Certainly, most of our music appeals to the adult audience. But, for the most part, it’s been subordinated to other priorities, such as family and career. So you have to make things very accessible. You have to make it very easy for them to find out about it and you have to make it very easy for them to get.
That is not so easy, but you try to find ways to accomplish that, knowing that there are no formulas. If you’re willing to be creative and aggressive and you’re willing to figure out a way to get your music to the customer – as opposed to waiting for them to come to you – then there is the opportunity to be successful.
** QB Content by Jack Barton **
