Tamara Conniff, "Billboard" editor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

Do you remember the first music you ever bought?

Whether it was a digital download, a compact disc, cassette, eight track, or a 33-1/3, 45, or even a 78 RPM wax record, I’ll bet you know that first song or album by heart.

Mine was way back in 1967, The Monkees’ Headquarters album. My parents bought it at the neighborhood pharmacy, believe it or not. I played it over and over and over again. I would have kept playing it, but my little brother, Ira, the future disc jockey, took a bite out of it, literally. I still have it though.

No matter what kind of music you like, whether it’s Bruce Springsteen, Lawrence Welk, or Gwen Stefani, we all form attachments to our favorite songs. For example, the first song my wife and I danced to at our wedding was Springsteen’s "I Wanna Marry You,” and it still brings a smile to my face almost 20 years later.

The point of these anecdotal snapshots? Music matters in our lives.

But the music industry itself is undergoing a historic shift away from the sale of physical albums to downloads of music, one 99¢ song at a time.

Where is pop music going? That’s the topic of today’s interview with Tamara Conniff, executive editor and associate publisher of Billboard magazine, where she oversees all aspects of the Billboard brand, from editorial to face-to-face events. She is the youngest person and first woman to hold this post.

Prior to joining Billboard, Conniff served as the music editor for The Hollywood Reporter for five years and was senior editor in charge of music for Amusement Business. Her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Boston Globe, and the New York Post, among other places.

Born and raised in Hollywood, she is also the daughter of the late American music legend, Ray Conniff.

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ANDELMAN: Let me ask you: is “American Idol” the greatest thing to happen to the music industry since Ahmet Ertegün, or is it the worst development since Milli Vanilli?

CONNIFF: Ah, I think it’s a little bit of both, actually. What’s interesting is industry observers during the first season of “American Idol” -- when it first started -- we were convinced that it was going to be dead in the water. And here we are multiple seasons later and millions and millions of albums sold.

I think what “Idol” really does represent is the shift in the music industry, of a texting-oriented generation. “American Idol” really sort of ushered in the whole text voting, which translates to ring tones and purchasing music with your mobile phone. It also really showed the marketing power of television over traditional media, like radio. It showed that shift in music. I would say that out of all the Idols, there are three breakout stars -- Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, and of course, Kelly Clarkson are actually really fantastic singers. Is it teen sugar-pop at its best or worst? Absolutely. Has it affected the ability for young artists who do not have that kind of exposure to get signed and be promoted? Yes.

ANDELMAN: In a positive or a negative way?

CONNIFF: Negative.

ANDELMAN: Really?

CONNIFF: Oh, yeah.

ANDELMAN: You think it’s closed doors?

CONNIFF: It has absolutely closed doors to a lot of artists in the business. The one question that record label executives ask themselves is, when they sign a young artist, “How do we break them if they don’t have a platform?” “American Idol” is a platform, you know. How they would normally do it would be to promote it radio, do a couple of radio shows, maybe do a mall tour depending on the age, But now, those avenues don’t hold the power, so unless you have television, either “American Idol” or maybe “Grey’s Anatomy” or one of the hit shows really championing your artist, it’s very hard to take an unknown artist and break them.






ANDELMAN: Wow. So would you say as those doors have closed, has the industry also gotten a little lazy?

CONNIFF: I don’t think it’s laziness as much as it is fear. In your introduction, you talked about the first album that you had in 1967. You look back at the ’60s and the ’70s, record companies were independent. A&M was an independent company. They weren’t owned by the conglomerates who are forcing record executives to meet quarterly numbers. The music industry isn’t like making cereal. You never know when you’re going to have a hit or not have a hit. EMI was late releasing the Coldplay album, and their stock plummeted. You know, back in the day, those issues weren’t a concern to music companies. They’d wait for years for the record to come out.

ANDELMAN: Right.

CONNIFF: So it’s not laziness as much as it is fear and trying to find something that’s going to help you meet those numbers.

ANDELMAN: Has the industry also come full circle in the last 40 years? In the ’50s and ’60s, even the ’40s, for that matter, it was really a singles industry. There were albums, but people were buying 45s and single songs, then we went through these years of the rock albums, the whole concept and the album, you’d be buying a whole album. There was album radio, and now we’re really at that point, aren’t we, with the 99¢ downloads, and some new artists aren’t recording a whole album, they record a song, and if they sell enough copies, maybe then they get an album.

CONNIFF: Well, the interesting thing is that it was really the record industry that kind of screwed themselves on this one.

The record companies actually took singles off the market about 15 years ago, and the reason why they did that is because singles were cannibalizing record sales. People weren’t buying the $12 album, they were buying a $2 single, so the record companies thought, “Hmmm, why should we offer singles and they are not buying the album? We’ll force them to buy the whole album for the single.” So they were releasing at that time a lot of albums that were a whole lot of fluff with one strong song, and the consumers had to pay $12 to get that album This was also during a time when soundtracks were very successful, because soundtracks are essentially a collection of singles.

So what happened with the advent of that technology and the peer-to-peer sharing technology is the consumer got really smart, and said, “I’m paying $15 for an album that sucks because I like one song. Here’s this new service; I can go get it for free.”






ANDELMAN: Well, I agree with that completely. I know the reason I stopped buying records was I was just sick of having to spend that much money, and really all I wanted was one song.

CONNIFF: Right. So you’re looking at a situation where it is a singles market, again. Absolutely, but that’s because of how record companies have been making albums and also because of technology.

ANDELMAN: How far can the “American Idol” approach go? It’s still drawing like crazy. As we’re talking, they are winding up what I guess is the sixth season, and I read where they’re talking about spinning off a show that is band-oriented, and of course, we have “RockStar,” the Mark Burnett show, and “Dancing with the Stars,” which is just kind of a variation, more focused on dance but heavy music. How far can all this go? Will we have more programs? Will we sell more records this way, or will it have to start to swing back at some point soon?

CONNIFF: At some point, everything swings back. Everything has a life cycle as pop music has a life cycle. I mean, you can go back to the real sugary, doo-wop of the ’50s, which is in no way dissimilar from 'N Sync or the Backstreet Boys. I think that this phase will pass, and then another phase will begin, and then probably another 15, 20 years from now, we’ll go back to pop music, and we’ll have another “American Idol,” which in many ways is sort of like “American Bandstand” except for the voting aspect of it. It’s all cyclical, I think.

ANDELMAN: We’ve talked a little bit about what may be wrong with the industry at the moment. What’s right about the music industry? What can it brag about? What’s it doing right today?

CONNIFF: That’s a very good question.

ANDELMAN: I was afraid from your brief silence that there was no answer.

CONNIFF: I actually have to think about what they’re doing right. They are actively embracing new technologies, finally, even though they’re a little late. Some of the companies, EMI being the forerunner, have said goodbye to DRM.

ANDELMAN: Digital rights management.

CONNIFF: Digital rights management, which is a big plus for consumers.

ANDELMAN: Do you think other labels are going to follow it because it’s the right thing to do or because it’s their opportunity to get an extra 30 cents a song for downloads?

CONNIFF: I think you have to do it. I’m kind of opinionated about this, but DRM is sort of like Reagan’s Star Wars, you know. Like, what are you doing? Essentially, you are punishing consumers who want to buy music by making it impossible for them to use it on the devices they want to use it on, and the people who are going to steal it are going to steal it anyway. So I think that DRM was a huge waste of money, and it’s torture to consumers who seek to buy music legally. I think eventually all the labels are going to have to abandon it.






ANDELMAN: Does the fact that its EMI reached this deal with iTunes… iTunes was already standing high apart from everyone else. Does it now put someone standing on its shoulders making it that much harder that anyone will ever catch up to it?

CONNIFF: I don’t know. The irony about iTunes and their DRM strategy is that they were like the worst culprits of DRM with the rights management drowning iTunes.

Listen, I think that they had to do this in order because other media players were actually starting to chomp at their heels. I don’t know. I think that it’s a cultural phenomenon, Apple and iTunes, is, and at some point, it will swing again, but I don’t see it stopping any time soon.

ANDELMAN: This is a little broad of where we’re going, but has the Zune had any impact in the market at all?

CONNIFF: Zune is a really fantastic product. The only problem with Zune is that not enough people have it for it to work. Zune is a sharing system, and in order to share, you have to have someone who has a Zune, so the problem is that it’s not mass market yet.

ANDELMAN: Do you think it ever will be?

CONNIFF: I think if they stick to it and continue to adapt it and make it smaller and find a right promotion for it, I think that it could be a viable competitor. But it was a very advanced product to come into a market that wasn’t really ready for it.

ANDELMAN: As you were saying that, I was trying to remember the last time I saw an ad either on TV or in print for the Zune, and I honestly can’t remember.

CONNIFF: Yeah. I think that they’re going back to the drawing board a little bit for the next incarnation of it.

ANDELMAN: So we talked about “American Idol”’s impact on the industry. What about iTunes and Apple? Have they played a big role in revolutionizing the music industry?

CONNIFF: Well, yeah, absolutely. Good and bad, I suppose. They have made music portable. They have made downloads legal. They have become a huge marketer of music. They’ve definitely steered people away from peer-to-peer sites where it was free to pay for music. The only problem is that they have also set a price point that is 99¢, and that’s a pretty low price point to start from. It’s hard to lower that. I think it would have been better for the industry to start it a little higher.

ANDELMAN: Of course, there has always been this belief in retail that you want to be under the dollar, whether it’s $9.95 being under $10 or 99¢ being under $1.

CONNIFF: Absolutely. But as you see the value of music going down, the monetary value of music going down, you might have wanted to launch it at $2.99 to have negotiating room, to bring the price down.






ANDELMAN: How much impact has iTunes and iPods and for that matter, Zune and SanDisk, how much impact have they had on radio, because I know that Billboard covers radio, as well.

CONNIFF: Well, radio, it’s not only that so much, I think the Internet has had the biggest impact on radio.

ANDELMAN: How so?

CONNIFF: With web radio, with bloggers being able to do play lists with web casts. On the web is where you find the old-school DJs or what we remember as DJs, where you find a community and someone whose taste that you like, and you go, and you listen to their playlist. That’s what DJs used to do. So I actually think that Internet webcasting and Internet radio have been the biggest Achilles heel of terrestrial.

ANDELMAN: That as opposed to satellite radio.

CONNIFF: Satellite radio is a totally different demographic. Your average kid can’t afford satellite radio, nor do they care or are they going to buy it. Satellite radio is for an older consumer, and it certainly has been positive, but I don’t think it’s really taken that much away from terrestrial.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.