He's helping indie labels band together
SALEM -- The music business has been kind to Don Rose. He lives in a large brick home with a swimming pool. He drives an Audi and owns a couple of antique racing cars, including an Aston Martin. He also races on occasion, though not without incident. He beckons a visitor to see some digital photos of a fire that erupted in his car's engine while he was racing this past year in Quebec. Several photos show him jumping out of the vehicle and spraying it with a fire extinguisher.
''Old guys driving old cars," the 50-year-old Rose says, explaining his fascination with vintage sports cars.
It's an understatement, of course, because once Rose puts his mind to something, he goes full tilt to make it happen. He's a risk-taking entrepreneur who opened the first CD-only record stores in the nation (Boston Compact Disc, which had branches in Harvard Square and on Newbury Street in the '80s) and the first CD-only label in Rykodisc Records, which became famous for CD compilations from Frank Zappa, David Bowie, and Elvis Costello.
These days, Rose has a new venture as the first president of the recently launched American Association of Independent Music. It's a trade organization designed to boost the profile, and the revenues, of independent labels who release most of the country's records each year (more than 80 percent) but get only 27 percent of overall earnings because the rest is swallowed up by the four major labels --
''This just appealed to me. The issues are so big right now and so interesting," says Rose, a slender, intensely coiled free thinker who was the consensus choice for his new job.
''I wasn't looking for this kind of work," he says, sitting at his kitchen table sipping a soda. ''I wasn't sure if there was a role for me in the music industry at this time. I was doing other stuff quite happily. I've got the beginnings of a DVD label, and I was in the classic car business, trading, buying, and selling European sports cars. And I had a consulting gig with a new CD manufacturing technology.
''But I decided in the first weekend that I was approached that I wanted to do this," he says. ''My title is actually acting president. The board right now is an interim board, and they want to become an elected board before they make any appointments."
That seems a mere formality, however, because Rose, the Michigan-born son of a cab driver, is already handling the job with the intensity that he brought to all of his previous endeavors. Those began with owning two retail stores (called Boogie Records) in Toledo and Akron, Ohio, before he moved to Boston and founded Eat Records, a cutting-edge indie that released discs by Human Sexual Response and Men & Volts. Then he cofounded Rykodisc, which was launched with $1,000 in 1984 and skyrocketed to a $7 million gross four years later.
Rykodisc was sold for a reported $25 million to Palm Pictures in 2000. Rose then moved to London for two years to head its international department, so he has experience on both sides of the Atlantic. Rykodisc was sold again, so he left and came back to Salem, where's married to another globe-trotting counterpart, Nina Simonds, a well-known author of Chinese cookbooks.
Salem may be home, but Rose has already hopped around the country for two ''Founders Conclaves" in New York and Los Angeles to solicit indie labels for the new association. So far, 85 have signed up, with dues starting at a minimum of $1,000 a year and scaled upward for bigger members. The interim board of directors includes the leaders of seven indies: TVT Records, Roadrunner, Tommy Boy, Thirsty Ear, the Beggars Group, Bar/None, and Lookout.
''We wanted more than a hired gun. We wanted someone who is committed to the fight for independent music," says Steve Gottlieb, president of TVT Records. ''The reason we chose Don is that we wanted someone who could relate to the small independent label that might be set up by a Boston college kid working out of his apartment . . . to someone who can sit down in front of Bill Gates and explain our position on technology."
Rose recently met with Gates, the
''Don was able to speed along the negotiations on that front," says Todd Martens, an indie-music columnist for Billboard. ''I think it's a foreshadowing of what can be done when these indie labels team up."
The timing may also be right for the association, says Martens, noting that indies are starting to have a higher chart presence as well, spurred by such acts as Bright Eyes and Interpol.
Indies were always where some of the greatest music originated -- think of Elvis Presley on Sun Records before he joined RCA -- and they are undergoing a rebirth today. A few years ago, a number of indies were being taken over by the major labels, but that trend is changing. ''The old business models aren't working anymore," says Lesley Bleakley of the Beggars Group. ''More people in the press are saying that it's great to be on an indie. Everybody now feels they have a fighting chance."
''There is very little cultural diversity represented any more by the four majors," says Rose. ''Their classical music departments have been marginalized. So have their jazz departments. There's not a whole lot of fringe-type music being supported by the majors. Even an artist like Tom Waits has gone back to the independent sector."
These are exciting times for Rose. Maybe not as thrilling as racing some of his sports cars, but he's getting to be a music fan again. It reminds him of first starting Rykodisc Records. ''The label was driven by new technology, but then we tried to apply a fan's approach to the product," he says.
As for his meeting with tech guru Gates, Rose says, ''My impression was that music was very important to him."
So did Gates own any Human Sexual Response records? ''Well, not that important to him."
