Every winter, Billboard magazine releases “The Power 100,” its list of the most influential people in the American music industry. Most are executives at major labels. The list in 2016 looked a lot like it always does: row upon row of white men, most of them graying, more than in years past having discarded the proverbial suit and tie in favor of a collared shirt unbuttoned casually at the top. Of the 141 individuals on the 2016 “Power 100,” less than 10 percent are people of color. (The list, bafflingly, allows multiple people to share a single ranking.)
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What may come as a surprise is that the situation is in some ways worse than in decades past. The aforementioned Reid and Rhone, chairman/CEO and president of Epic Records, respectively, came up in the 1970s, part of an influx of black executives, managers and producers to enter the mainstream music industry when labels were looking to capture black audiences — progress that has been all but been reversed in the years since.
The
improvements in the 1970s began with what is known colloquially as The
Harvard Report, a Harvard University Business School study commissioned
by CBS in 1971. “That report basically said that the major labels, if
they wanted to make a dent in this huge business of black music, which
really exploded in the ‘70s, they would have to bring on black
executives and affiliate with black production companies and artists to
become successful in that area,” says John Kellogg, an entertainment
lawyer and professor at Berklee College of Music. CBS, acting on that
advice, went on to cut deals with the soul labels Stax and Philadelphia
International Records, helping to usher in an era of black leadership
and influence at the major labels.
Kellogg
himself was part of the trend, encouraged by the inroads made by other
black lawyers and artist reps. “At that time we had gone through the
civil rights movement and we had a number of black entertainers, and a
number of them were hesitant to use black representation because they
felt that if you weren't white, you couldn't get the kind of deals they
thought white people could get for you,” Kellogg says. “All of that
really changed with David Franklin in the '70s, as he went on to
represent major artists like Roberta Flack, Miles Davis, Cicely Tyson,
Richard Pryor.”
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Article:
http://www.wbur.org/artery/2016/10/05/black-leadership-music-industry
