Y.E.S. to Jobs Gets Music Industry’s Nod Again : Summer Program Will Employ More Than Twice as Many Minority Youths as in ’87

“This is just a drop in the bucket,” A & M Records President Gil Friesen said a year ago when his record label initiated a program that gave summer music-industry jobs to 50 minority youngsters.

On Monday, Friesen saw a second drop in the same bucket--but this time Y.E.S. (Youth Employment Summer) to Jobs is considerably bigger: 130 youngsters will be working this summer in the industry, with the program having expanded from Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and Chicago to also include Washington, San Francisco, Detroit and Philadelphia.

“We’re seeing the community respond to us in ways they didn’t do last year,” said Karen Kennedy, the Y.E.S. to Jobs administrator. “We hadn’t even planned to run the program in Philly. But several people in the record industry in that city came to us and said, ‘We really want to see this happen in Philadelphia. What can we do to make it work?’

“That says to us that we’re doing something right and this is needed, and it’s needed in even greater numbers than we’re doing this year.”

The number of participating companies has been expanded to include the huge Warner/Elektra/Atlantic distribution company (WEA); BMG (which distributes RCA and A & M); radio stations (including KPWR-FM and KBIG-FM locally); record store chains (Tower, Music Plus); magazines (Black Radio Exclusive, Spin), plus the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the MTV cable network and some concert promoters and theater owners.

Her goal this year, Kennedy said, was “to make this an industry-wide program, as opposed to just an A & M program. And we’re really pleased at the response we got, especially from WEA. Four days after we first approached them, we had 32 positions worked out in four or five different markets across the country. And we’re hoping that that sets the pace for all the other record companies next year.”

If the Y.E.S. to Jobs program is getting bigger, does that mean minority representation in the music industry is getting better?

Last year’s training program began just as the record business was under increasing fire for lack of minority representation.

The National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People released the results of an 18-month study early last year that concluded that the record industry “operates as a world unto itself, a closed society that sets its own rules and maintains a longstanding tradition of feasting on the talents of black artists and tossing crumbs from the table to other blacks.”

(Of the record industry’s annual earnings of $4 billion to $5 billion, slightly more than 11% is spent by black consumers. But a far greater percentage of its income is generated by black artists like Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and Prince, who have made many of the biggest-selling LPs of recent years.)

When the NAACP report was released, one of the strongest critics of the industry was South Carolina-based consultant L. R. Byrd, who suggested a boycott of offending companies and was so strident in his condemnation of the business that the NAACP disassociated itself from his remarks.

A year later, Byrd, who still works occasionally with the NAACP on special projects, says that things in the record industry are getting a little better.

“I have to acknowledge that there have been some changes, some positive movement,” said Byrd. “We’ve seen a lot of changes at the top: Companies have taken the people who should have had the jobs a long time ago and made them VPs or divisional heads. But if you trickle below that, there’s not that much of a change. They’re doing better now, but there’s not enough change that the companies should be taken out from under the microscope.”

Last summer’s Y.E.S. to Jobs program--which, A & M officials said, was being developed before the NAACP criticism--showed these results: five of its 50 participants wound up with permanent record-business jobs and one is now in Tower Records’ management-trainee program.

Under the program, high school students with good grade averages are given minimum-wage summer employment and an inside look at the record industry. This year, the organizers plan to hold frequent in-depth seminars for the participants in all eight cities.

Ornetta Barber, WEA’s vice president of black music marketing and one of that company’s coordinators of the Y.E.S. to Jobs program, said she wouldn’t have gotten her own job in the record industry without a small student training program sponsored by Warner Communications a decade ago.

“The entertainment business is still a very small network of folks, and you have to know the right people to get your foot in the door,” she said. “I mean, I would never in a million years have gotten in if I didn’t get in through that training program, because I didn’t know anybody.”

Y.E.S. administrator Karen Kennedy, meanwhile, is looking forward to a time when virtually every company in the industry is participating in Y.E.S. to Jobs. “I would like to see us develop an alumni of thousands,” she said. “I think we ought to be able to employ at least a thousand students every summer.

“It’s just a matter of paying attention to the opportunities that are already there. These are jobs that would have been filled by someone else, or maybe would have gone undone. All we’re doing is taking the needs that these companies already have, and matching that up with the needs of the community. And when we do that, it lets us find people who can be real contributors to the recording industry.”

Still, consultant Byrd is wary.

He said most labels responded to last year’s NAACP pressure by “doing what companies around the country traditionally do when they’ve been (criticized): They put the one black in management. And if you look at most companies now, they’ve still got the one.

“But I don’t know if the one is acceptable for a company that’s pulling the kind of dollars out of the minority community that these companies are. And in some cases where there have been promotions, other areas have been cut. If you give one black a vice-president slot and then cut out five black reps in the field, you haven’t helped black America.”

What is needed, Byrd said, are record company-sponsored programs like Y.E.S. to Jobs in every community, along with industry support of black-run businesses, such as concert promotion and management firms and other music-related companies--because if those companies flourish, they’ll hire minority youngsters not for the summer, but for life.

“Any program where a company interfaces with local minorities and discovers what’s going on is good,” he said. “When each company can point to programs like the Y.E.S. program, and can identify serious dollars that they spend with minority businesspeople, then we can say that there’s been some progress. That’s when blacks will start to get a return on the dollars that we spend on music.”