Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.05.2008, Qupperneq 14

English-born, German-raised entre-
preneur Mark Chung first made a
name for himself in the early eighties
as bassist for the highly influential
industrial band Einstürzende Neubau-
ten. Early on in the band’s life Chung
undertook the task of administering
its finances, which would eventually
lead him to a fruitful career in the
global music industry running his own
publishing company as well as head-
ing Sony Independent Network Eu-
rope. Among other things, it saw him
working with many of the musicians
that dominated the FM waves of the
last decade. Chung, who now reigns
over his own Berlin-based publishing
firm, Freibank Musik, recently visited
Iceland on business and agreed to tell
the Grapevine about some of his expe-
riences in the collapsing empire that
is the global music industry, where it’s
taken him and where he sees it going.
How did I get started in the business? As
most musicians know, the bass player is
the most economic thinking person in
the band; they hardly practice and girls
can’t tell the difference between them
and the guitar player. Thus when you
become a bass player, you’ve already
got a grasp on the laws of supply and
demand. Every band needs a bass play-
er, while there’s plenty of guitar players
around. So if you want to be in a band,
it’s a good idea to play bass.
Now, being the economic thinking
person in my band, I was soon put in
charge of taking care of business, and
business pretty soon became pretty
complex in our band because we had
to find ways of making a living off a
rather exotic type of music. So we did a
lot of contracts and international deals
that had to be managed. We worked
on a country-to-country level, finding
enough people in Japan or the UK who
were interested to release our albums
there, and so on, selling a couple of
thousand copies in every country. We’d
sell about 100.000 copies of an album
worldwide in the late eighties.
Was it a lot of work? Well, we were quite
lazy and toured very little. Another
thing that saved us a lot of time is that
we never rehearsed, which is not a con-
cept I recommend for young artists. We
only rehearsed once in our time, when
we’d gotten bored by our way of doing
things and thought it would be good to
challenge ourselves by rehearsing for
our next album. I’m not going to say
which album it was; it wasn’t one of the
better ones.
I played with the band for 14 years,
and for the last five we started our
own publishing company because we
were unhappy with the situation we
found in the market. We built a very
efficient company, which we soon re-
alized would be even more efficient if
we helped some of our friends who had
asked us why we couldn’t handle their
copyrights as well as our own.
“We Didn’t Strive to
Dominate the Market”
I saw an opportunity to build what I call
an artist friendly publishing company,
based on efficiency and improvement
of copyright collection and administra-
tion of copyrights. And that was defi-
nitely missing in the market, so for a
couple of years I tried to do both the
band and the business, but that wasn’t
really working because we would go
on tour for three months and then had
to start over, which makes it hard to
develop a new business. It was easier
to focus on one or the other, and ob-
viously I’d played in bands for twenty
years at that point so I thought it was
time to focus on the business side. I am
glad that I did, and I have to say that I
was very lucky; after spending some
time building the publishing company
the people from [international indie
label] Play it Again Sam came along
and wanted to build a European inde-
pendent label.
I worked on that indie label for two
years and the majors were always com-
ing up to us to ask if we could help
them develop new artists, because it
seemed like we were a bit better at han-
dling artists at an early point in their
careers than they were. They wanted
to give us some of their baby artists to
develop. However, it wasn’t until Paul
Russell from Sony records approached
me that the idea seemed viable for us,
as he was the first one to want to let us
keep the artists after they’d had their
success.
So we made the Sony Independent Net-
work Europe model and that worked
well as a concept for five years. We had
a lot of success; the indies under our
helm broke artists at home and within
very short periods of time we could turn
that into global success stories, which
worked out pretty well for everybody.
We had our failures as well, of course.
The way we combined the strength of
the majors and the indies is that we’d
mostly let the indies under SINE do
their thing, and then Sony would come
in with their strong and efficient mar-
keting department. Having a presence
in every territory of the world and hav-
ing a structure in every country made
for a very efficient structure. I was sur-
prised by how many records you could
sell at that time; we sold 70 million al-
bums operating a small team over five
years.
Conferences, Cocaine and Hookers
Decadence in the record industry, you
say? Well, when I joined Sony in ’96 it
was really the tail end of decadent 90’s
era. Still a bit excessive, but when you
went to conferences people reminisced
fondly about hanging with Walter Yet-
nikoff [notorious former CBS/Sony Mu-
sic exec] in the preceding years: “... and
we were on a boat with a lot of hookers,
and there was all that coke and every-
body got gold watches to take home as
souvenirs after the party...” It isn’t like
that any more; it must have been more
in the late eighties and early nineties.
What happened is that a) the record
industry convinced the artists that CDs
were really complicated and expen-
sive, so everybody agreed on taking a
royalty reduction of 25% and b) they
convinced the buying public that CD
technology was so expensive that they
had to raise the price: when of course
the truth was that the format very soon
became much cheaper to manufacture
than vinyl. The profit margins were in-
credible, they blew up, and a lot of re-
buying was going on as well, with peo-
ple replacing their old vinyl collections
with CDs. Those were ten or twenty
years where, frankly, I think the music
business created a lot of the problems
that it’s had later on. It grew so fat and
rich that a lot of very mediocre-to-bad
managers survived very well by just be-
ing there, and even managed to show a
profit. For a lot of people in the major
companies, the strategy was to attach
yourself to something that was success-
ful, and distance yourself from what
was not. That was a survival strategy
that worked and kept a lot of incompe-
tent people in the business.
Collapsing Old Industry
In that sense, it was a good thing and a
right thing that the bubble burst; a shake
out on the structure level wasn’t so bad
for the music industry at all. However,
after the fourth round of firing people,
you could tell that some really good
people were getting let go. I realized
that the SINE model wasn’t working
anymore when I went to Sweden – at
one point, some Oasis album had just
come out and we weren’t getting the
second single on the radio. “Hang on.
The Oasis single? Whaddaya mean it’s
not on radio?” I arrived at Sony’s Swed-
ish office and I found the lady who was
head of radio promotion in the mail-
room, packing parcels. I realized she
was the only radio promotion person
left with Sony Sweden, and she was
responsible for the entire international
repertoire, and the entire Scandinavian
roster, and SINE. And her assistant had
just been fired the week before. Which
is why she was in the postal room, actu-
ally sticking sellotape on records that
were to be shipped to radio. So the Oa-
sis record was probably somewhere in
that pile of records to be mailed out.
But what we did at SINE, and
what we’re proud of, is that we man-
aged to introduce new artists into the
system, artists that had maybe been
well known at home but lacked inter-
national recognition. And that ability,
to develop new artists internationally,
has been lost by the major companies.
And that’s still the situation because
The Fallacy of Excess: Inside The Music
“...people remi-
nisced fondly about
hanging with Wal-
ter Yetnikoff [noto-
rious former CBS/
Sony Music exec]
in the preceding
years: “... and we
were on a boat
with a lot of hook-
ers, and there was
all that coke and
everybody got gold
watches to take
home as souvenirs
after the party...” It
isn’t like that any
more.”
14 | Reykjavík Grapevine | Issue 05 2008 | Feature