Supersonic Boom

Rock music has brought fortunes to hundreds of youthful performers, offbeat promoters and once unknown musical entrepreneurs. As a cultural phenomenon that knows no season, rock has also made the nation's record industry immune to this year's economic slump. Recording companies expect to reach an alltime sales peak of $1.8 billion in 1970, a 14% increase. The company that has profited most from the trend is Columbia Records, a division of Columbia Broadcasting. In the past three years, Columbia has doubled its share of the record market, to 22%, an amount almost as large as the combined total of its two closest rivals, Capitol and Atlantic-Warner.

Behind Columbia's supersonic boom is its president, Clive Davis, 38, a Brooklyn-born Harvard law grad who rose through the corporate law department and has no musical background. While his personal taste runs to the old heartthrobs like Johnny Mathis, Davis has a knack for spotting trends and picking out what will sell in almost any field of music. Since taking over in 1965, he has radically changed Columbia's image. He switched the emphasis from Broadway show albums and the "easy-listening" music of Andre Kostelanetz and Mitch Miller to contemporary rock. Columbia already had Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel and the Byrds under contract. Davis greatly expanded that list by adding such innovators as Janis Joplin, Laura Nyro, Santana, and Blood, Sweat and Tears. Rock moved from 15% of Columbia's volume in early 1967 to more than 50% now. Last year Columbia's domestic division had sales of about $200 million, and pretax profits almost doubled, to $25 million.

Monterey Pop. Davis stumbled on this new source of Columbia's prosperity almost by accident. In May 1967, he attended the Monterey Pop Festival in California because one of Columbia's groups was playing there. "It was the first meeting place for the flower children," he recalls, "and I was very impressed with the whole youth revolution that I saw there. The kids went crazy. It was the start of the group era and of a whole new kind of innovative music. It changed the nature of my career."

It also changed some of his ideas about managing talent. "This business is such a personal one now that the company heads have got to be involved with the artists," Davis says. He began breaking down the barriers between the Establishment corporate head and the young performer, personally seeking out and signing up unknown artists and luring away from rival companies more established stars. What Davis offered them was more control over their own artistic expression than other companies had given them. By the time that his competitors realized what Davis was up to, Columbia--and Atlantic-Warner --had already recruited much of the top talent. Says Davis: "The other companies just got frantic and signed the wrong artists."

From Rock to Bach. While Davis was adding new talent, he also began trimming costs by dropping 100 of the least successful of Columbia's 250 performers. He made two innovations in record pricing. Columbia began charging the same price for mono and stereo records; that led to the phasing out of mono albums and thus reduced company expenses. Next, Davis started the variable pricing technique, adding $1 to the suggested list price of al bums that he believed would be big sellers across the country.

Now Davis is looking forward to Columbia's further development of quadrisonic sound, a kind of double-stereo system that was introduced on tapes last year by Vanguard. Columbia plans to have its own quadrisonic records and tapes on the market within a year. Davis has also kept his company humming in all other fields of recorded music. He maintains Columbia's strong position in Broadway show albums, and this autumn will back a pair of shows: Richard Rodgers' Two by Two, starring Danny Kaye, and The Rothschilds, by Bock and Harnick, the men of Fiddler on the Roof fame. In country music, Davis has Johnny Cash, who in 1969 sold 6,500,000 albums, probably an all-time high for an individual artist in one year. Meanwhile Columbia still leads in the classics. Its Switched-On Bach of late 1968 was the second-bestselling classical album ever put out (after Van Cliburn's recording of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto), at just under 1,000,000 copies sold.

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