more musiz biz

I read about Mo Ostin in my music book, in the chapter on independent promoters. When they upped legislation to crack down on payola (not to be confused with The Payolas), the companies all turned to independent companies to do the promotion and the dirty work--so the money still comes from the companies, but they keep their hands clean. Mo Ostin tried to spearhead a boycott of them, but no one followed. He sounds like a coolio guy. (I'm trying to find models--both good and bad--for my book. So far more bad than good.)

For three decades, Mo Ostin helped steer the Warner-Reprise record labels through a remarkable period of commercial prosperity and musical excellence. During his tenure, which stretched from 1963 to 1995, Ostin became known within the industry as a business-savvy mogul with an artist-oriented outlook. The operative philosophy at Warner Bros. was to allow talented artists to develop and to keep the more deserving ones on the roster without obsessing over the bottom line.

It’s been written that “by the early 1970s, Warner Bros. and Reprise had become the unofficial arbiters of musical taste.” An accountant by training, Ostin displayed uncommon empathy for the non-quantifiable artistic temperament. “Warner Bros. Records has never been run from the perspective of financial people or legal people or promotion people,” Ostin said in 1994. “We’ve always been a label solely about artists and music.”

It proved difficult to maintain that outlook as Warner Bros. got absorbed into increasingly larger corporate media conglomerates, from Warner Communications to Time Warner to AOL Time Warner... In the late 1990s, Ostin and former Warner Bros. president Lenny Waronker moved to DreamWorks, where they implemented their strategy of signing artists of merit and patiently building their careers. (Rock n Roll Hall of Fame)