The Guardian Weekend | 27 February 2021 The Guardian Weekend | 27 February 2021 15 15Hipgnosis fl owed from the merg ing of two distinct ideas during Mercuriadis’s
fallow decade. First, he realised in the early days of Spotify that streaming
would save the music industry by activating a vast number of passive
listeners: people who had never bought an album would happily pay £
a year for a Spotify subscription. “Music has gone from being a luxury
purchase to being a utility purchase,” he says. Not only would streaming
expand the overall revenue pool; its granular data would quantify the value
of every song.
At the same time, Mercuriadis believed that songwriters deserved a better
deal. Out of every pound spent on streaming, around 58 p goes to artists and
record labels for the recordings, while only 1 2p goes to songwriters and
publishers for the songs. This inequity, enshrined in the industry for
decades, was being highlighted by the growing importance of professional
songwriters. The last Billboard No 1 album not to feature a single additional
songwriting credit was Bob Dylan’s Tempest, in 2014; Beyoncé’s Lemonade ,
by contrast, featured almost 40. “ Songwriters are delivering the most
important component, yet getting the smallest cheque,” Mercuriadis says.
Everybody knows this is unfair, but there is little incentive to rebalance
the equation, because the three major publishers are owned by the same
people as the big three record companies. “I wanted to change the system,
but I realised that I didn’t matter as an individual,” Mercuriadis says. “I might
manage some great clients, I might have money in the bank, but I could still
be swatted like a fl y. I recognised that I would need leverage if I was going to
have any impact.”
Hipgnosis gives him that leverage by increasing the income and bargaining
power of songwriters. Mercuriadis says that song management is partly
a question of manpower: a staff er at a publisher might handle 20,000 songs,
whereas a Hipgnosis employee will be responsible for no more than 2,000,
so that each one gets serious attention.Nova Scotia, Mercuriadis started writing letters to Simon Draper , the
co-founder and A&R visionary of Virgin Records, whose signings included
Mike Oldfi eld, the Human League and Culture Club. “I love this, I hate that,
Virgin’s the most artist-friendly label in the world” is Mercuriadis’s summary.
Eventually, aged just 19, he was off ered a marketing job at Virgin’s Toronto
offi ce. “I remember him as a real enthusiast, a total music fanatic, and he’s
stayed that way,” says Jeremy Lascelles , who ran Virgin’s A&R operation
in London. “He has an incredible, encyclopaedic knowledge of music and
a huge record collection. When [we both] lived in west London, I used to see
him in Rough Trade, buying 40 records.”
At Virgin, Mercuriadis helped to develop the cult Canadian singer-
songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara and to launch Simple Minds in North
America. “It was his energy and commitment that saw us go from gold
to multi-platinum in Canada, and then achieve similar in the States,”
says Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr. “He was great to hang out with.
I recall him securing the best seats for us all to go see a Springsteen show.
I had the impression that, for him, working with music was some big,
exciting adventure.”
In 1986, Mercuriadis moved to London to work for Sanctuary, the
management company and, later, record label founded by Iron Maiden’s
managers Andy Taylor and Rod Smallwood , and stayed there for the next 21
years. “He was like three people rolled into one,” Smallwood remembers. “He
knew all the music, he was up on the news and gossip in the business, and he
had his management day job. Being a teetotaller probably helped. That was
unusual in the business at that time.” When Mercuriadis married in 1989, his
best man was Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson. His three daughters all work for
Hipgnosis while his son, a Brit school graduate, is “the only one in the family
who has musical talent”.
In 2000, Mercuriadis moved to New York to run Sanctuary Records’ North
American operation. He helped to relaunch the Rough Trade label, propelled
by the Strokes and the Libertines, while his management roster included
Elton John and Beyoncé. He had a particular talent for working with artists
who were infamously hard to handle, such as Axl Rose and Lou Reed. “His
management style was very much to get into the head of the artists and try to
understand what they wanted to achieve,” says Taylor. “ He has a bond with
creative people.”
Mercuriadis jokingly calls himself a “horse whisperer”. “I listen to the
artist to fi nd out what’s important to them, and then I try to make that
happen,” he says. “The truth is, success is not diffi cult when you’re talented.
What’s diffi cult is having the success that you want, and that means you have
to be incorruptible.”
When Mercuriadis became CEO in 2004, Sanctuary was the UK’s largest
independent label as well as the world’s largest management company and
biggest independent holder of song catalogues – but then it all fell apart,
and fast. After a period of rapid expansion, Sanctuary was hit especially
hard by free fi lesharing services such as Napster and collapsing album sales
that plunged the whole industry into an existential crisis. Nile Rodgers
remembers feeling anxious for Sanctuary when he visited the label’s
extravagant new offi ces. “It was real Hollywood. I was like, ‘ Woah, what
happened?’ I knew that was the beginning of the end.”
A painful period of downsizing and refi nancing wasn’t enough to save
Sanctuary, which went to Universal Music Group for a fi re-sale price of
£44.5m in 2007. In the process, Mercuriadis lost most of his management
clients. At 44, after more than two decades of unbroken success, he was
poleaxed by his fi rst major reversal of fortune.
“I withdrew,” he says. “I was still managing people like Morrissey and
Diane Warren , but I knew there was something missing. I’d built something
with my partners that was best in class and to me it all felt like a failure. After
21 years, I had nothing to show for it.” He rubs his skull. “I never went for
a diagnosis, I’ve never taken medication, but if you asked my wife, she’d
probably say that I was depressed.”
Looking back, he thinks that he lost discipline and focus, and vowed that
would never happen again. “The ego, as everyone discovers at some point in
their life, is a terrible thing.”
‘Songwriters deliver the most important
component, yet get the smallest cheque.
I wanted to change the system’→DYLAN COULTER/THE GUARDIAN