#70 Ted Cohen | Why Artist Development Died

In 1972, Ted Cohen talked his way through a crowd of 70,000 people and onto the side of the stage at a Led Zeppelin show in Atlanta. He had no ticket, no pass, and no plan beyond finding the tour manager. By Monday morning, the president of Atlantic Records had offered him a job.

That's the version of the music industry Ted Cohen came up in. He spent the next five decades inside it: artist development at Warner Bros. and Atlantic for Van Halen, Fleetwood Mac, Prince, Talking Heads, The Who, and The Pretenders, then negotiating Warner's digital deals with EMI, iTunes, Napster, and Rhapsody as SVP of Digital Development.

What you'll learn:

• How Ted got hired by Atlantic Records’ president before he’d even left the Led Zeppelin stadium
• Why he never gave Prince a single note of direction across years working with him
• The stunt that had Van Halen roll into record stores in an armored car and a stagecoach
• How he snuck Coca-Cola branding into a venue locked into an exclusive Pepsi contract
• Why he calls himself a “forgiveness executive, not a permission executive”
• What artist development actually did for touring bands, and why the job doesn’t exist anymore
• The bar coaster he still puts on the table before every negotiation

Ted Cohen Bio:

Ted Cohen has spent five decades in nearly every corner of the music industry — from artist development at Warner Bros. with Van Halen, Fleetwood Mac, Prince, Talking Heads, The Who, and The Pretenders, to negotiating the label's digital agreements with EMI, iTunes, Napster, and Rhapsody as SVP of Digital Development, to co-creating the Leadership Music Summit. He's made Billboard's Power 100 list three years running, founded TAG Strategic, and now teaches at the University of Tulsa. He's been in more rooms where the industry got built — and rebuilt — than almost anyone still working.

Sponsor:

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Host: Nikki Sanz