Shaggy’s Hit Raises the Dead at MCA

The No. 2 album on this week’s pop chart, reggae singer Shaggy’s “Hotshot,” has everyone in the record business scratching their heads.

It’s not just that it’s unheard of for a reggae act to sell anything close to 2.1 million copies of a record. The stumper is that the smash recording was delivered by MCARecords, a label long dismissed as “Music Cemetery of America.”

A division of Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, MCA is an anomaly in the hit-driven music industry. The increasingly corporate record business craves quarterly profits, and MCA chief Jay Boberg has survived by delivering a string of albums that have consistently posted moderate sales--even if they often peak at No. 21 on the charts.

It’s a track record that hasn’t won MCA a reputation as a leader in cutting-edge music but has been valuable enough to persuade Boberg’s bosses to sign him to a new five-year contract last summer.

“We’re more conservative than some of our competitors in terms of jumping headfirst into the next hottest thing, which means we’re less at risk in many areas,” Boberg said.

Unlike some other Universal labels, Los Angeles-based MCA has made its financial projections each of the last five years, sources said. The label generated an estimated $281 million last year on sales of albums by such acts as Blink 182 and K-Ci & JoJo and added about $37 million in profit to Universal’s bottom line.

MCA also boldly promises to increase sales this year more than any other Universal label, on the expected revenue from forthcoming albums by such artists as Mary J. Blige and Live. Both are successful acts who saw a decline in sales over their last two records.

“He delivers the numbers--but that’s not good enough, by the way,” said Universal Music Group Chairman Doug Morris. “He’s right at the cusp of getting over that wall now. I think that Shaggy and the records that are right behind it will win the battle.”

Even with the success of Shaggy, rival executives say, Boberg is whistling past the graveyard. Among Universal’s four major music labels, MCA is by far the smallest, garnering just 2.35% of the domestic market in sales of current albums last year, down from 2.51% a year earlier.

Boberg’s laid-back, cautious approach, critics say, has prevented him from repairing the label’s anemic rock roster or signing any hard-core rap acts during his five-year tenure, a time when the genre was booming.

He acknowledges that his ascension has been a struggle, particularly as he guided the company in a time of “insecurity” after Seagram’s acquisition of the former MCA Inc. and then the merger with PolyGram.

“I think any time someone is named head of a major label that has not run a major label [before], there’s skepticism,” he said. “Our industry rarely gives people the benefit of the doubt.”

Boberg, 42, broke into the record business promoting concerts at UCLA, becoming a college rep for A&M; Records. As a junior, he joined artist manager Miles Copeland in 1979 to found I.R.S. Records, which went on to become a pioneering independent label, signing acts such as the Go-Go’s and R.E.M.

After the sale of the company to EMI for an estimated $20 million, he was tapped in 1994 to head MCA’s publishing arm. He was promoted to president of the flagship MCA label one year later. This came after the ouster of veteran executive Richard Palmese, who quit under pressure amid an executive shake-up that followed Seagram’s purchase of the company.

Within months of being elevated to president, Boberg shook things up at the label, firing dozens of employees and artists as well as severing ties with several money-losing joint ventures.

Boberg said the move to downsize forced MCA to release fewer albums annually and to target its resources on turning those releases into hits. That formula paid off for pop-punk band Blink 182 but did not work for such MCA acts as Methods of Mayhem or SoulDecision.

In the case of Shaggy, the label won credit for committing to the reggae artist’s album even after his first single bombed. But luck played a role as well.

Shaggy didn’t take off until a Honolulu deejay, who claims to have obtained the record by downloading it from a Web site, began playing the track “It Wasn’t Me.” Local sales spiked and sent the label’s promotion team scrambling to push it in other markets.

“I remember Jay saying to me, ‘If we see significant sales in Hawaii, we got something,’ ” said Shaggy, a Jamaican-born reggae artist who signed to MCA in 1999 after being dropped by Virgin Records.

Boberg “didn’t bail. That was my attraction to the company. . . . The roster was small, and I knew I could get attention. I had everybody at MCA rooting like hell for Shaggy.”

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Shaggy’s Label

MCA Records has delivered consistent profits but remains the smallest major division in Vivendi’s Universal Music Group.

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Percentages of unit sales for Universal’s divisions:

Interscope/Geffen/A&M; (IGA): 31.8%

Universal Records: 19.6%

Island/Def Jam Music: 18.6%

MCA: 8.4%

Other: 21.6%

Source: SoundScan