Passion for Music Drives Columbia Chief to Make Plenty of Industry Noise

Columbia Records Chairman Don Ienner runs the No. 1 label in the music business--home to a diverse roster of stars that includes Bob Dylan, Los Super Seven, Offspring, Lauryn Hill, Bruce Springsteen and Lil’ Bow Wow.

In a business dominated by number-crunching suits and timid middle managers, the 49-year-old New York native stands out. Ienner’s rivals characterize him as a fierce competitor who stops at nothing to get what he wants. His temper is legendary.

Over the last decade, Ienner has transformed Sony’s Columbia division from a washed-up pop monolith into a muscular hit-making machine, reestablishing the label as a power in rock, rap and R&B; music while more than doubling revenue from $300 million in 1989 to $730 million last year.

Dylan calls Ienner an “unstoppable force.”

“As far as music goes, his love for it is unquestionably genuine. The true-to-life music, whether it’s the kind that’s bloody and unprocessed or even highbrow, the height of sophistication,” Dylan said last week. “Donny gets it all. He gets the whole picture.”

Ienner broke into the business in 1972 as a hired hand at his brother’s production company and moved on to hone his management chops working under music veteran Clive Davis at Arista Records. He was tapped to run Columbia by his competitor and friend, Sony Music Chairman Thomas D. Mottola, and continues to thrive there as a member of what is considered to be the most stable executive team in the music business.

In his first extensive interview in his three decades in the music business, Ienner discussed the challenge of running a giant record company that pumps out 100 albums a year and addressed perceptions about his volatile management style.

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Question: As the man who runs the No. 1 label in the business, what do you perceive as the biggest threat to the future of the record industry?

Answer: I think the most dangerous thing happening right now is that fans are no longer interested in anything but hit singles. They don’t seem to have the slightest curiosity about musicians anymore or what goes into the making of their art. That’s not a good thing. When I was growing up, fans of a talented artist like Eric Clapton followed every move of his career. When he jumped from the Yardbirds to Cream to Blind Faith to Derek and the Dominos, we couldn’t wait to buy his next record, never even hearing a note.

It’s not like that anymore. You can turn in the best album of your career and nobody will even blink if you don’t flag it with a hit. Radio will ignore you. MTV will look the other way. It’s a very tough market now. Analogous to the film business. If a preview for a movie fails to strike a nerve, the audience will just skip the entire movie. It’s a sad situation. And usually you don’t have the luxury of a second chance. In most cases, particularly with established stars, if you don’t have a hit single out of the box, your album will tank. If album sales falter, it hurts ticket sales. If people don’t come to your concerts, that erodes T-shirt profits and other merchandising income. Add it all up and it dramatically impacts an artist’s livelihood. The stakes are high.

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Q: So how do you score so many hits?

A: At Columbia, we have what we call war meetings. We devise a plan of attack where we figure out exactly which hill we intend to take first. We map out the second and the third hills and how bloody we expect the battles to be. We calculate specific marketing and promotion strategies for each project. There’s a reason why Sony has more 20-million sellers than any other company. It’s because we think globally. The entire executive team here under [Sony Music Chairman] Tommy [Mottola] is intimately involved in plans to push our records in territories outside the U.S. Sony acts like Ricky Martin, Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill, Celine Dion and Shakira tour relentlessly and build fan bases throughout Latin America, the UK, France, Japan, everywhere. We help set all that up. Part of the reason Bruce Springsteen is such a huge global seller is because he has toured fiercely worldwide for decades.

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Q: Does the Internet make you nervous?

A: I hate the piracy, but I have to laugh at the press sometimes. Remember all those articles about how the Web was going to free artists from the chains of record companies and allow them to rule their own creative destiny? How many new acts have broken on the Internet so far? I’ll tell you how many, zero. Thousands of sites and not a single hit. It’s tough being an artist. You have to write and sing and perform from this pure spot. You have to create something to inspire fans so fickle they’ll abandon you for the next video game. I can’t tell you how much I admire what artists do. That’s why I got into this business. I love music. But what we do is tough too. We can’t make music, or we’d be artists. But we know how to take art and spread it around. People on the Internet don’t have a clue what goes into marketing and promoting a hit record. They have no idea how hard it is to get people to pay attention.

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Q: What part does radio play in the equation?

A: It’s difficult. Many radio stations are afraid to take chances on songs by unknown artists and yet they refuse to play new songs by established acts. That’s why we sink so much energy into event marketing.

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Q: What’s that?

A: Well, it used to be considered somewhat of a cultural event when a great artist like Bob Dylan put out a new record. Not anymore. No matter how fantastic the music is, what you have to do now is create an aura around the record so it seems like an event. Take Billy Joel, for example. Even if he had a full-blown smash, you’d have to tie it to a movie in some way. You have no choice. Aerosmith has a new record coming out, but before we even put a video out, we asked them to appear on the American Music Awards. And on Sunday, we set it up for them to perform during the Super Bowl with ‘N Sync. That’s the way it is now. Sting couldn’t get radio to touch his new album until he provided a track to Jaguar for a commercial and everybody started asking about it. The fact is you’ve got to event-market the first single by most established artists now or it’s just not going to work.

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Q: Who do you consider your biggest competition?

A: Two names come immediately to mind: [Interscope Group chief] Jimmy Iovine and [Def Jam head] Lyor Cohen. Those guys are very competitive. They fight hard for their music acts. They want to win as bad as we do. But it’s fun to compete. We love competition here. Tommy [Mottola] is a great coach. He’s got a great philosophy about fighting to win. I think that’s natural in America.

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Q: You’ve got a reputation for screaming. Let’s talk about your temper.

A: OK, let’s talk about it. The reputation stems from the fact that I am extremely passionate about what I do. I hate to lose. I’ve been in this business for 30 years, and whatever I do, whether I’m signing a band or finding a song or fixing a mix, my ass is on the line. I owe the artist something. I owe the company something. So I fight for them to the death. The most important thing I learned working for Clive [Davis] was never to allow anyone to compromise the artists or the company. Our job is to take the artist’s vision into the street and to get as many people to hear it as we possibly can. And when that process gets messed up, I get angry. I get loud. I get excited. That’s who I am. That’s the way I work. I will always get excited. And if the day ever comes that I stop getting excited, I’ll go do something else.

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Q: So when competitors suggest that the reason you have no president at Columbia is because people are afraid to work for you?

A: That’s bull. We have one of the longest-running executive staffs in the business. There is virtually no turnover at this label. The reason I don’t have a president is because I run the label. The chairman thing is just a title. I’m not a corporate guy. I come in here and work with my staff on every project.

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Q: You’ve been the No. 1 label for three years in a row now. But when you went through a sales lull awhile back, your head was rumored to be on the chopping block. Several newspapers even reported that you were about to be fired. Through it all, you never said a word. How did it make you feel?

A: Do you have any idea what it’s like to have your mother and your wife open up the New York Times and read a big story about you losing your job? To have your kids’ friends tell them at school, “Hey, I hear your dad’s getting fired.” I knew it wasn’t true, but it made me feel terrible. I couldn’t figure out who inside of the company was trading on me, but somebody was obviously out to get me. And it just kept mushrooming. I’m not a paranoid guy, but I’ll admit that it really made me think about whether it was time to leave. I decided to tough it out. Tommy said to me, “Donny, it’s just newsprint. Tomorrow it will be crunched up in a pile of garbage and gone.” He was right.

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Q: These days, competitors are trying to lure you away.

A: Yeah, all of us have been offered other jobs. But we like it here. This is a real team. I’m sure other guys would rather be promoted to bigger roles. But I know what I’m good at. You have to know yourself. I don’t want to end up in some desk job. I work hard and I love it. Let me tell you something: Most people don’t even know what hard work is. My dad used to work three jobs at a time. He had a job at the sanitation department where he went in at 8 a.m. and came home at 4:30 p.m. Then at 6 p.m., he’d go to his second job, where he cleaned office buildings until late. On the weekend, he worked a third job from midnight until four in the morning. One day, when I turned 11, he dropped me off at a golf course to caddy. I haven’t had two weeks off since.