His bombastic attacks keep music industry on its toes
LOS ANGELES - Bob Lefsetz is cranking the outrage to 11. Again.
Lefsetz - one of the music industry's most influential analysts, and certainly the loudest - is seething about the state of the concert business. Tickets are too expensive, he howls. Service fees are out of line. Music fans are being "raped" by promoters.
"Where is the CONCERT-GOERS' bill of rights?" he shrieks, gesticulating wildly. "What the [expletive] IS GOING ON?!"
Bloviating about the industry's shortcomings has made Lefsetz famous, and infamous, as the sharply opinionated author of the widely read Lefsetz Letter, which has become a viral sensation.
On this particular day, the Lefsetz Letter has gone live: He's been invited to speak at the Concert Industry Consortium, an annual trade convention. And so, somewhat improbably, he's on a stage in a hotel conference room, doing what he calls "my act" for a standing-room-only crowd whose very business he's ripping apart.
Lefsetz tears into promoting giant Live Nation. Goes after greedy booking agents. Lambastes Ticketmaster. Refers to Warner Music Group chief Edgar Bronfman Jr. as "a [expletive] idiot."
Basically, he comes off as kind of a nut. Yet his acumen draws readers who include some of the most powerful figures in the music business. His fantastical dispatches tend to get high-profile industry insiders talking - often to Lefsetz himself. Island Records Urban Music's president, Jermaine Dupri, venerated rock musician Al Kooper, Sire Records founder Seymour Stein, and former Verve Records chief Tommy LiPuma are among those who have written to the Lefsetz Letter recently.
Lefsetz, 54, comments daily - and sometimes, it seems, hourly - on whatever piques his interest: diminishing album sales, the meltdown of the major-label system, skiing, the greatness of Regina Spektor, the overrated legacy of Patti Smith, the unremarkable wardrobe of Kenny Chesney.
Onstage, addressing the concert promoters, Lefsetz is blustery and entertaining and insightful and infuriating, and he doesn't pull any punches.
The crowd, though, isn't punching back. The moderator challenges several of Lefsetz's stances, and an audience member disagrees with Lefsetz's take on the Led Zeppelin reunion concert. But the session ends with an ovation.
"I wasn't sure what to expect," Lefsetz says afterward. He shrugs. He almost seems disappointed.
Once, Bob Lefsetz was a lawyer doing pickup legal work. But it was never his intention to become a practicing attorney. Once, he was a talent manager for heavy metal bands. But nobody understood his creative vision.
In high school, he edited a student newspaper in Fairfield, Conn., where he experienced a significant moment of cool. Riffing on the big Paul McCartney rumor of the day, Lefsetz wondered, in print, whether his school's headmaster was dead. "It was a huge hit," he recalls.
In some ways, he seems to have been questing for some inchoate sense of self-coolness - for validation - ever since, and perhaps he's found it by turning his own life into a performance.
After graduating from Middlebury College in Vermont, he moved to LA. He earned a law degree, landed at a firm with entertainment clients, failed to make it on his own as an independent record-label owner and talent manager, got mixed up in the movie business, then met heavy-metal singer Blackie Lawless from the band W.A.S.P.
That led to Lefsetz's first and last major music-industry job, in 1984: running the US division of Sanctuary, a London-based management firm whose clients included Iron Maiden and W.A.S.P. Lefsetz was fired less than a year later. "I was fighting for the artistic integrity," he says, which "was secondary to everybody getting along and keeping people's egos stroked."
Thumbing through a copy of Billboard, he had a Lefsetzian revelation: "I can do better than this!"
The biweekly Lefsetz Letter launched in 1986, with no advertisements. Annual subscriptions were $89 (soon raised to $110). It created a stir from the outset, but there was no windfall for Lefsetz.
Still, he kept publishing. In 2000 he took the Lefsetz Letter online and stopped charging. "When I hit send, I'm reaching tens of thousands of people," says Lefsetz, who won't say what his subscriber base is.
But if they don't pay, how does Lefsetz pay for the therapy, the dinners with industry players that he's always writing about?
"That's the age-old question," says Larry Solters, spokesman for Ticketmaster, Nielsen SoundScan, and the Eagles. "How does Bob make his money? I don't think anybody knows."
Lefsetz says that's because he doesn't really make any.
He gets checks from
While the analyst/provocateur says some people misunderstand his mission - "I'm not angry; I'm just passionate about music and trying to speak the truth about it" - just about everybody in the industry seems to read his newsletter, at least occasionally.
They include Randy Phillips, president and CEO of
"It's amazing how many people read him, given how many people say they hate him," Phillips says. "I think some of his columns can be phenomenally interesting, when he gets it right."
