April 23, 2006
 
Rock 'n' Roll; So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Executive?
By Wm. Ferguson

Wm. Ferguson is an editor at The Times Magazine. He played bass guitar in the 90's rock band Lotion.

THE student record label has a history at least as old as the compact disc. In 1982, Columbia College, a small media-arts school in Chicago, added an elective called ''Decision Making: Music Business'' to the curriculum of its arts, entertainment and media management program. AEMMP Records -- the core of the class -- was the brainchild of Irwin Steinberg, then chairman of Polygram Records, and Chuck Suber, publisher of DownBeat magazine and the new director of Columbia's graduate program in music business.

AEMMP Records was an introduction to an industry on the verge of a wholesale reinvention of itself. MTV was brand new then, and CD's, available to audiophiles as Japanese imports, wouldn't be widely sold in the United States for another year.

Most student labels follow the template Columbia introduced: find an artist to submit a finished recording, put together a CD and release and market it over the span of a semester or two. It is this model that Columbia's outspoken new music-business coordinator, Kimo Williams, would like to scrap.

''Right now they are just collecting master tapes of artists,'' he said. ''It's basically a P&D deal'' -- industry shorthand for production and distribution. What Mr. Williams has in mind for AEMMP is an even more prominent role in the curriculum, making it, he said, ''the entire catalyst for the music-business concentration.'' In his scheme, students taking a talent-management course would scout for artists, the production class would record the songs, the marketing class would promote the record and so on.

''What the students do here should parallel what happens in the real world,'' Mr. Williams said. But he was quick to add that the consequences should remain in the classroom. ''They make a mistake, and they only get a D,'' he said. ''Out there? You make a mistake in L.A., you don't work in that town again.''

........... distinction between the music business and the record industry was also made by several music-business professors, including Kevin Erickson, faculty adviser for AEMMP Records.

The distinction addresses an apparent paradox: why is enrollment in music-business studies rising when the industry itself, plagued by illegal downloading, is supposedly in decline? The answer, Mr. Erickson says, is that the music industry isn't in decline, record labels are.

He says he asks his students where they want to work when they graduate; only 20 percent choose labels. The others are drawn to entrepreneurial ventures like licensing, video games, even ring tones (song snippets downloaded to cellphones made the industry $5 billion worldwide in 2004).

''The music industry's never going away,'' Mr. Erickson said. ''There's always going to be a kid who grows up and wants to be a rock star. And he's going to need some help.''