Fearless Records SVP Promotion Mike Jacobs

This past June, after a decade away from the music business, Mike Jacobs got pulled back in. It was quite by accident that it happened, but it really wasn’t a surprise. Jacobs stepped away from the music biz at the end of the last century after having a successful run during the ’90s where he maneuvered many bands across the Alternative radio landscape and into stardom. We recently sat down with Jacobs for a conversation about why he chose to return and what made Fearless Records the place that brought him back.

By Michael Parrish

This past June, after a decade away from the music business, Mike Jacobs got pulled back in.  It was quite by accident that it happened, but it really wasn’t a surprise.  Jacobs stepped away from the music biz at the end of the last century after having a successful run during the ’90s working with bands like The Offspring, Bush, No Doubt, and eventually signing Blink 182 to his MCA imprint Way Cool Music, where his business card read CEO and Head Dumb Ass.  But don’t let the title fool you. Jacobs is anything but a dumb ass.  During the ’90s he maneuvered many bands across the Alternative radio landscape and into stardom. But after tirelessly being dedicated to his passion, he realized his family life was passing him by and he stepped away to spend time with his son, David, just as he hit his teenage years.  Jacobs never fully left, as he dabbled in a small project here or there and also took on management duties for Rusty Anderson (a.k.a. Paul McCartney’s guitar player). So when his son David had fully matriculated and set out unto the world to make his own way, taking a job at southern California label Fearless Records, Jacobs got sucked back into the vortex of music promotion joining the label as Senior VP of Promotion. We recently sat down with Jacobs for a conversation about why he chose to return and what made Fearless Records the place that brought him back.  

Let’s get to the burning question. You left the industry for personal reasons to be with your family, specifically, your son, David. What brought you back? 
Here’s what happened.  December 31, 1999 was the last day I worked. I was with Bush and No Doubt because we did MTV New Year’s Eve. That was the last day I worked.  My son, David, was twelve and I’d been on the road for three or four years straight through with Offspring, Bush, and No Doubt. I had sold my label back to Universal two years earlier right after I signed Blink 182and I said, “I’m done.” I had a lot of good luck and happy accidents, like getting the label deal.  I don’t know why somebody thought I was smart enough to have a label, but it worked. I was there all the way through with David, and he graduated from Marshall Business School at USC in 2010, obviously way smarter than me. So that project’s done and then it was, “Now what happens?”
In spite of all the advice I could give him, David decided he’d go into the record business because he has the music passion junky problem like the rest of us.  He was working at another place when he saw a job at Fearless listed somewhere that he wasn’t qualified for, but he interviewed for it anyway.  They could see that he was somebody they wanted to have, and he ended up getting hired.  I started talking to [Fearless CEO] Bob Becker, and the next thing I know, Bob popped the question and I went, “Oh, what else am I going to do?” Everybody told me it’s not fun anymore you, but I decided to go for it and came in here as Senior VP of Promotion.

Can you give us some insight into Fearless Records?
Bob started this label by putting out singles for his friend’s band.  It’s how a lot of people start.  Doug Morris started selling records out of his trunk.  He evolved and evolved and then he had several big successes.  They do the social networking scene here better than anybody.  There are twenty bands here whose names I couldn’t even tell you yet they sell 80,000 records and have never been on the radio.  Blessthefall debuted at #2 on the iTunes Rock chart recently and they have never been on the radio.  But they also had Plain White T’s which they had upstreamed to Hollywood and had a #1 record with “Hey There Delilah.”  The Mainewent to Warner Bros.  Portugal The Man went to Atlantic.  Obviously they have the ears for finding really good bands and they develop the bands, which labels don’t do anymore.  But Bob got tired having to give them away to the major labels, and then getting screwed on the radio side by not having people in-house.  So the idea was to train David in-house and within their culture instead of having to bring in somebody. So now David and I work as a team, along with Danny Buch and his people from RED, and it works!  We’re actually about to chart a band called Breathe Carolina next week.  I’m not a Top 40 guy, as you well know, and my first record back is a Top 40 project that we’re on the verge of charting, so it’s very exciting.

What is your role within the structure at Fearless?
My job is to get this company in the radio business without ruining what they really do, which was a big problem back when I did this with Brett [Gurewitz] and Epitaph in the ’90s, because all the bands wanted to be on the radio after we broke The Offspring and Rancid; and it steered the company wrong for awhile.  Here there’s delineation between those two things, and my job is to make sure we pick the right ones. There are only a few executives here: Bob, who runs the company; there’s a CFO; the head of A&R, Chris, who’s great; and then there’s a General Manager and me. But on the other side of the hall there’s a room that has twenty employees in it.  There’s a publicist over there.  There are a number of people dedicated to doing nothing but online marketing. Breathe Carolina has over half-million Facebook followers.  These people can mobilize people in any city and it’s amazing. Bringing this company into the radio world with the right band is like having a lot of little gas leaks and deciding which ones to torch off, picking the right ones hopefully.

You’re coming back to a different world as far as promotion goes and the way radio is run. What are some of the initial differences you have noticed in your return?
The biggest single difference is the end of the Alternative format. It’s really due to PPM and corporate ownership.  When you and I first started in Alternative, stations were owned by a guy. Corporate ownership and PPM changed everything, and now it’s about, and it should be, the stations have to make money. I also found that a lot of guys I knew were gone and a lot of new people from different formats were on Alternative stations. But then a lot of my friends are still around.         So the adjustment for me was in learning who the players are, but also how it runs because when people play fewer records there’s less chance of taking risks.  The Alternative format is down to so few good markets that its viability as a format is challenged now.  One of the biggest problems is that the core bands in that format are putting out really weak records, and they’re not developing new bands so those stations then become Classic Rock.  Whereas, look at Triple A, they’re developing tons of new bands and it’s a vital format in big markets.  You’ve got to look at that.  And when you look at Top 40, it isn’t really much different than it was.  

The corporate programming structure wasn’t really set in place yet when you left.  What are your thoughts on it now that you have encountered it?
Layers of programmers are true across the board, but I have adapted to it. The three biggest champions on our Breathe Carolina record are three big Clear Channel stations: KDWB in Minneapolis, WKSC in Chicago and WKQI in Detroit.  We’re an independent label, but those three places gave the record a shot. I’m looking at the sales numbers, and there are increases in all three of those markets, so you just have to learn to adapt.  But yeah, there are layers of programming and it’s not like the old days.  I went to seeKevin Weatherly a month or so ago.  We spent about an hour-and-a-half together, mostly reminiscing about the ’90s and how much fun that was.  He can still do what he wants because he’s the VP, but CBS has layers of programmers. Clear Channel has layers, but that’s just how it is.  It’s a business in a way it wasn’t before, especially at Alternative. It’s eye opening to the fact that we love music but radio needs to make money, and that’s okay.

Has it been frustrating for you to find that individuality has not been able to maintain throughout the years?
I don’t know if I’d call it frustrating.  The biggest word I’ve learned, and the old Mike Jacobs would have said something really controversial here, but I’ve learned a word that everybody kept saying to me: patience, which is something I never had.  If you don’t have it now, you can’t do this job. So it was a learning curve for me because I am not a patience guy; I was used to instant gratification.  I could walk in someplace with a record and my batting average had been good enough that people would put it on.  It doesn’t work like that anymore.  By the way, let me ask you this: Do I hate the fact that that’s changed?  Sure, I’d love it to be the way it used to be, but I’ve got to live in the real world. 

The Alternative and Rock world is where you lived before, but now you are working with Pop stations. How has that transition gone for you?
It’s been a big learning curve.  There have been a lot of people who I work with that have guided me through it, like Danny Buch and Guy Zapoleon. I’ve just kind of learned by doing.  You pick up the phone, call guys, and sound like you know what you’re talking about. I didn’t want to be just that Alternative guy. I already did that and succeeded.  And this is what makes it more fun for me. One of the things I thought about was what if I come back and fail? You go out on top like I was able to just because of the happy accident that I signed Blink 182 and how that that worked out, but the thought of coming back and failing makes me try harder. So as far as Pop radio goes, promotion is promotion.  I’ve adapted to it, but I did have to learn patience.

What is your radio promotion plan moving forward and what type of staff do you have to work with?
The idea is to pick records and not get ourselves jammed up with too many.  The company has the resources to do whatever is necessary.  They sell a lot of records.  They sold two million Plain White T’s records.  As far as the staff, my son David is in the unfortunate position that I’m his boss.  But he’s good at stuff that I’m not, and living in this electronic age, I’ve had to adapt technologically. Now, if you can’t text people, you don’t talk to people.  We have great people here who do publishing, sales, video and online stuff. I learn from those people every day. But interfacing radio with that staff has been a learning curve, because it’s a whole new thing to them and I have to be careful that I don’t mess up what they already do successfully. All of a sudden here we have a band that’s about to break, and we have radio shows and all of this different stuff, so I’m feeding it to them slowly and making sure that the company adapts so we don’t change the culture of the company. What made the company good was that it had good music, and Bob still focuses on finding bands.  There are a lot of things that have just been signed here that are coming and really strong, but you have to pace yourself. So my first job is to put us on the map at radio, and we’re going to do that with Breathe Carolina.

Talk to us about Breathe Carolina.  David had made me aware of them before you joined the company and they have had growing success. How would you describe them?
A lot of people call it Electro Pop.  It’s basically a down-the-middle Pop band, two kids from Denver who are 22-years-old.  Their last record sold 60,000 units with no radio, ever!  They sell about a thousand tickets in every major market.  They just got back from Europe where they’d never been on the radio.  They have a career. This is their third album and we’re at 70,000 singles sold as of today.  They’re a great live band and were more of a Screamo band but on this record they just came up with some songs that were more Pop and this one in particular that were working, “Blackout,” just clicked for radio, and there are a couple of follow-ups on it.

You mentioned before about learning to work in today’s digital age. How is your learning curve with getting engrained into digital strategies and social networking?
There are people much smarter about it than me that do it here.  I use those numbers, and I actually got an iPhone and learned how to text and keep my glasses on so I can see what the hell I’m doing.  But there are people here that feed me information and the information gets fed out.  Really this has become a business of feeding information, hasn’t it?  I had to have a steady diet until I started learning and understanding that stuff, but now when a record is testing in such-and-such a market, they can go in and use Facebook and stuff so that the fans in that city know the record’s on the radio.  It’s not the old days of jamming the phones.  These are real people that really like the band and really will respond and want to hear it on the radio.  It’s kind of an interesting that there are no smoke and mirrors anymore.  By the way, it used to be a lot easier when there was. I say that jokingly, because I’ve always felt that hit records are hits when they’re written, and people who do what I do are just the delivery boys.  We know who to deliver them to and the right people who put them on the radio. We’re just the conduit.  Hit records are hit records.  You used to be able to have a weaker song and fake your way through it, but those days are over.

What would you say to somebody who is just getting into the industry today about how those relationships work, and what you learned from the old ways of promotion into the new ways today?
It’s still all about relationships. People will always rise to the top and those relationships twenty-years later are the ones that keep you in business. It’s the people who have the music passion that still seem to succeed.  The people who are just businessmen don’t seem to succeed in this business.  
[eQB Content by Michael Parrish]