Word: rapping
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...friend U2 manager Paul McGuinness about getting into the record business. "You can have all the money in the world and be the unhappiest guy in the world," says Field. "I wanted to do something that meant something in my life." And what would that be? Making hard-core rap records, it turned out. McGuinness introduced him to Iovine. Venture met capital. Flatbush met Beverly Hills...
...little-known gospel group named God's Property made its debut last summer, more than a few record executives must have gagged on the irony and wished the album a quick trip to industry hell, the discount bin. The group's distributor, Interscope Records, had previously banked some of rap's most notorious performers. But the rap-flavored rhythms and praise-the-Lord lyrics of God's Property rose in the charts. Divine intervention...
Iovine intervention is more like it, as in Jimmy Iovine, head of Interscope Records. Prodded by its new owner, Seagram, Iovine and partner Ted Field are remaking Interscope from a high-risk purveyor of gangsta rap into an imposing presence in rock, R. and B. and gospel, gobbling down an ever bigger slice of the $12.5 billion U.S. record market. God's Property--which went on to sell a heavenly 1 million copies three months after hitting record stores--helped slingshot Seagram's Universal Music Group last summer from fifth place to third place among the six top record companies...
...years ago, Interscope was a small record company that became a huge political problem for its then owner, Time Warner (parent company of TIME's publisher), by releasing gangsta-rap albums such as Tupac Shakur's 2pacalypse Now. Capitulating to critics, Time Warner severed its joint agreement with Interscope and sold its 50% stake back to Iovine and Field for $100 million. Four months later, the two resold that stake to hit-starved Universal for $200 million. This is not an industry big on morality plays...
Since then, Interscope's sales have nearly tripled, to about $340 million this year. A hefty portion of those sales was spun off by its hugely profitable rap subsidiary, Death Row Records, whose owner, Suge Knight, is in prison and whose biggest star, Tupac, is dead, victim of a gangster-style rubout as he rode in Suge's BMW. Facing this kind of continuity problem, Iovine and Fields started focusing the company's resources on nonrap acts, and the shift is paying...