Word: rca
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Here's where the American Idol business gets dicey. Davis would like RCA to curate the careers of artists; Fuller wants his idols to have long recording careers too, as long as they don't forsake the Idol audience. (Fuller was incensed that Davis spent eight months refining Clarkson's debut for radio rather than getting it to market as soon as possible.) "You have to serve many masters when you have that many people with a vested interest in you," says Ennis. "You can't skew yourself one way and not speak to the people who spent all that...
...Studdard said, according to an executive who was on the call. "If you guys want to navigate, that's great. If you guys want to drive, then you better get a new car." Studdard is now working with Missy Elliott and R. Kelly on what an RCA executive termed "a credible, clean hip-hop album...
Still, pop isn't just music. It's a package, and Aiken has had numerous frustrations with the way RCA has tried to tweak his image. Everyone--label, management and Aiken--was thrilled with Aiken's Rolling Stone cover shoot, so photographer Matthew Rolston was hired to direct a video for This Is the Night. In it the story line was...Clay Aiken does a magazine photo shoot. "They had me in this tight little vintage T shirt and jeans and a leather jacket," says Aiken. "And [Rolston] had me sing the song in one scene with this angst attitude...
Aiken laughs off most of RCA's foibles--like the time he was forced to change his unstylish shoes before appearing at an industry convention, or the airbrushing of his eyes on the Measure of a Man album cover--because he believes that the label is clueless about how to market to an audience he knows instinctively. "I'm a battle picker," he says. "I try not to get upset about all this marketing stuff because I'm saving it for the time that they tell me that I need to do a song about 'Let's hook...
...creative executives do. They don't make art, but they facilitate it, fight for it and nurture it, often in the face of public opposition or apathy. Record companies have always made plenty of music aimed at the heart of the market, but the frustration of the anti-Idol RCA executives--and many others throughout the industry--comes down to timing. At the exact moment that American Idol has created a surge of people who buy their music with their mints as an impulse item, file sharing has siphoned off nearly all the adventurous record buyers. That leaves a whole...