Chris Blackwell & The PolyGram Story

Over the years there has been speculation and utterances from artists like Junior Reid who says Chris Blackwell is an all powerful force in the music industry. Whether or not Reid’s sentiments are true, Blackwell himself has had to deal with much more powerful forces as he maneuvered a space in the global entertainment industry.

In July 1959 a young Blackwell founded Island Records and eventually brought reggae icon Bob Marley and U2 to the world and as a result he has earned the respect of his peers. However, in 1997 the music entrepreneur had one of the most talked about clashes with the world’s largest music company and it’s then leader at the time.

Blackwell did not mince his words to criticize then chairman of PolyGram Alain Levy and said his goals are in jeopardy if he should continue under the leadership of the Dutch conglomerate.

PolyGram wanted to become a larger player in the U.S. market and the Blackwell beef started to affect those prospects.

Island Sold To PolyGram

The Island Records founder sold his label to PolyGram UK for £180 million ($300 million) in July 1989,—he explained in 2009: “It had gotten too big and too corporate for me and I couldn’t really handle it.” The deal included the record company, its distribution operation and music publishing catalogue reported the LA Times. At the time of the sale, Island was one of the few successful record companies not already owned by a major conglomerate, and all the major record distributors Capitol-EMI, –CBS, BMG, Warner Communications and PolyGram were bidding for the extensive catalogue.

With PolyGram eventually snatching up the label they took on Blackwell as president; he said he went along to ensure they didn’t erase Marley’s legacy.

After pocketing only $80 million from the deal due to royalties owed to U2, 8 years later, the then 60 year old music impresario grew so fed up with the corporate culture at PolyGram and offered to resign from the company’s board of directors.

His offer to quit the board was prompted by the French Executive Levy who made the suggestion to him after the two had been in disagreement for some time. Blackwell lambasted Levy in the media in an unprecedented way for music executives.

“What I have come to realize is that it is not really possible for me to continue to grow creatively in the entertainment business within PolyGram,” Blackwell said in a phone interview from his GoldenEye estate. Jamaica. “I feel that Alain Levy is restricting me, and I don’t understand why. It is unlikely that I will be able to do what I want to do and still stay within the corporate structure,” Blackwell stated publicly in the LA Times.

As companies were going after music houses that were built from the ground by entrepreneurs the pressure was on to sell records and increase the company’s bottomline.

The easy going Jamaican grown Blackwell believes that meeting corporate demands for increased sales to drive up stock prices is not how an artist’s career is built. He believes artists should commit to the industry and make albums that may not hit until their third or fourth project. Bob Marley’s first album Catch A Fire Blackwell has stated in his memoir ‘The Islander’, only sold 14000 units in the first year and in its first month only sold 6000 copies. Additionally his assertions are underscored by the fact that much of the world didn’t catch on to the Marley magic until he died in 1981.

“When I renewed my contract a few years ago with PolyGram, I was under the impression that I was going to be able to build an entertainment business with an independent feeling within PolyGram,” said Blackwell, in 97 whose PolyGram contract was due to expire 1999. “But it isn’t going to happen. I really believe that it is impossible for an independent type of company structure to work and grow within a corporation like PolyGram. You can’t sit and wait and do projections on everything the way they do. You have to trust the judgment of the people you hire. In my case, I feel that Alain has repeatedly disregarded my judgment.”

The career music executive scoffs at the idea of “chart music” and says much of the music that charted no one remembers who sang the songs in Icon Magazine.

He compares Island artist building trajectory to that of Motown, “It’s all about how pretty you are or what you can sell with the music. If you look at Island Records’ history, you realize how few hit singles we had after “My Boy Lollipop.” Look at the same history for, say, Motown. There you find a zillion hit singles from artists that nobody remembers even existed. We had album artists, bands that are still active and, even though the music industry looks like it does, still sell millions of records. It’s unbelievable!”

“I’ve always had a good feel for the new and slightly different, and have never been afraid to trust my intuition,” says Chris.

Blackwell built Island from a one-man operation into an industry powerhouse that introduced the world to ska and reggae music. His other top acts include Cat Stevens and Steve Winwood.

Over the years, Blackwell expanded Island into movies, resort hotels, animation and at one point even had a  line of independent cinema theaters.

His public statements more than likely infuriate Levy especially in an interview, where he claimed he was growing increasingly frustrated at PolyGram since Levy rejected his proposals to acquire a chunk of Interscope Records and of alternative music cable station the Box.

Seagram eventually picked up a half interest in Interscope for $200 million. Interscope became one of the hottest music labels in the business, with acts like Tupac and Dre Dre generating revenue in the hundreds of millions throughout the late 1990s.

He disassociated himself from Alain’s vision, “Alain and I have not seen eye-to-eye for a long time,” Blackwell said. “I don’t understand Alain’s vision. He’s not a very communicative person. He never discusses anything with me–which is fine. But then just let me do my own thing. Don’t stop me at every turn,” he chided.

“This is what the story really is: good and bad. Alain’s point of view is this: Just because I come up with these ideas, why should PolyGram automatically finance them? And he’s absolutely right. It doesn’t say in my deal that just because I have an idea PolyGram has to finance it. But I don’t think he has confidence in my judgment. And it’s very frustrating for me,” Blackwell said at the time.

In 1997, PolyGram, a subsidiary of Holland’s Philips Electronics, was the leading record company in the world in the US it controlled only about 13% of the $12-billion market throughout the 1990s.

Over a ten year period in the late 80s up till then PolyGram spent more than $1 billion to acquire a handful of prominent U.S. labels, including Island, A&M;, Mercury Records, Motown and half of Def Jam.

“[But] what corporations don’t understand is that you can’t run studies and projections on what is going to work and what isn’t in the entertainment business,” Blackwell said. “You have to decide if you want to be in business with a recording act or not. And what they don’t get is that entrepreneurs like me are more like acts than businessmen. Either you’d like to be in the Chris Blackwell business or not. Question things. Make suggestions–by all means. But don’t stop us at every single turn just because you don’t understand what we want to do. If Island Records was just starting out attached to a major corporation structure the way that label deals are set up now, we never would have survived. Not in this corporate environment. Absolutely not,” he told the LA Times.

In November 1997, PolyGram terminated Chris Blackwell’s contract and removed him from the board. The company eventually named and then 40 year old Davitt Sigerson, the chairman of Island Records and John Barbis, 50, as president of the Island unit. They were tasked with spearheading the careers of U2, the Cranberries, and Dru Hill, among others. Sigerson reported to Roger Ames, president of PolyGram Music Group.

In May 1998, alcoholic distiller Seagram Co. which owned Universal Studios bought PolyGram for $10.6 Billion and PolyGram Chief Executive Alain Levy’s fate was in limbo. He eventually left to join McKinsey as a senior advisor. Levy then went to EMI where he championed the era of the Itunes downloads with Apple.

PolyGram was eventually folded into Universal Music Group, and PolyGram Filmed Entertainment was folded into Universal Pictures, which had been both Seagram successors of MCA Inc. The entertainment division of Seagram faced financial difficulties, and was sold to Vivendi, and MCA became known as Universal Studios, as Seagram ceased to exist. To date Vivendi remains the majority owner of the Universal Music Group. In February 2017, UMG revived the company under the name of PolyGram Entertainment, which currently serves as their film and television division.

Blackwell never reentered the music industry as a label executive. He still runs a fleet of hotels and owns Blue Mountain Publishing which was established in the 1960s managing the catalogues of Chronixx, Marley and U2.

Founder of Primary Wave, who started out as an executive at Island, Larry Metsel, acquired a portion of the Marley rights in a 2018 $50 million partnership with Blue Mountain Publishing. Larry said recently that everything he learned he got it from being mentored by Blackwell.

“Even today, almost 30 years after I started at Island, everything that I know and do today is the result of working with Chris Blackwell for 11 years. I’ve worked with a bunch of other people since Chris, but absolutely everything—deal-making, marketing, artists, relationships, etc. —I learned from being mentored by Chris Blackwell. No one else even comes close. I learned very early from Chris the perspective of the artist always being the most important, first and foremost.”