Legendary Music Executive Allen Kovac and his independent path to success on the Takin A Walk Podcast Series.

Buzz Knight:

On this episode of the Takin’ A Walk podcast series, I’m in beautiful Litchfield County, Connecticut, the Northwestern part of the state, where I spent many years, an eye popping area. I’m delighted and honored to be takin’ a walk with a music industry visionary, a man who was carved his own independent path with a steady eye on cultivating his artists, collaborating with them to yield peak performance. Allen Kovac is the founder of indie label, Better Noise Music and film division, Better Noise Films, which produced the wildly successful film about Motley Crue on Netflix called The Dirt. He’s managed a range of artists, including Blondie, The Cranberries, the Bee Gees, and Motley Crue. Let’s go take a walk with Allen Kovac.

Speaker 2:

Takin’ A Walk with Buzz Knight.

Buzz Knight:

Well, Allen, it’s so great to be taking a walk with you here in the beautiful Hills of Litchfield County. Thank you for having me here.

Allen Kovac:

Well, it’s wonderful to reconnect with someone after 25 plus years who had a great deal of reverence for, in the broadcasting business at a time where people were dogmatic and narrow minded, you always had an open mind to change and different concepts. And that made me really want to do this.

Buzz Knight:

Well, thank you. You’re very kind to say it, I’ve admired your work, and what you’ve built, and what you’ve continued to build. So I’m really looking forward to this episode. We’ve got some bicyclists this coming by.

Speaker 3:

Hi.

Buzz Knight:

Hi there. That’s the beauty here of this series, we just let everything fly. We let our thoughts fly. We let the passers by stay in there and we’re walking down this beautiful path. Well, let me just ask you first. So taking a walk is, certainly there’s a mindfulness, there’s a health aspect of it. How do you use, as a leader, taking a walk to help you at moments if you’re creatively blocked or something like that?

Allen Kovac:

So I was lucky as a teenager going to college at the University of Oregon, where the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi showed up after he was working with the Beatles and every college kid had to go to learn transcendental meditation from this gentleman. And it took me down a path of running and taking walks in Oregon, hikes that were up mountains and down mountains, and just looking at scenery like those rocks. So mindfulness, to me, is having the wind hit your face and you actually feel it. And you think about how it feels and you see the different shades of light in a field, or you look at different shadows, smells, your feet on the ground.

Allen Kovac:

And what that does is it takes that mind that’s on 10 and it slows it down. And it gives you a clarity that rival’s meditation, but it’s different because it’s your senses. Meditation is similar, and it’s important to me every morning and every night, because that unwinds your mind when you get started. You’re not running to the coffee machine. So I’m a green tea guy now. So for me, eating right, exercising, mindfulness, and meditation allow a highly stressful business with crazy people, not to engulf your life when you decide you’re finished working and you want to be a real human being.

Buzz Knight:

Oh, I love that. Well, I have to tell you, yesterday I was, for the first time in a long time, I was at Grand Central Station, and rush hour, and I was watching everybody. And it made me grateful that I’m not one of those people every day, hopping on the train, running to catch it. But it also made me sad thinking about just that stress level that you could feel at that time with people. So it’s like, I don’t know, I look at the world today and it’s challenging times.

Allen Kovac:

Very challenging, especially if you’re 25 to 35 and you’re used to the social aspect of a company. And now your in your shared apartment, or your studio apartment, or even your apartment, and it could be a big one, but they’re missing the social aspect. So that’s where you have the mass resignation that you’re having. Women who need to focus on childcare and 25 to 35 year olds, fortunately for us, we’ve been able to be sensitive, but also guide them, if they’re not happy, to realize that we have seven offices around the world and signing new five year leases is something that is a timing issue. And one of the things we did during COVID is we used the money that we weren’t spending on offices to bonus folks, to help them set up their apartments or homes, and to be able to make the transition. If they want the office, they can find a job.

Allen Kovac:

And the one thing that I’m happy about is Joe McFadden’s worked with me for 30 years in different capacities. And Steve Kline’s worked with me for almost 20 years now. And my CFO is amazing, and I just love mentoring, getting people to the point where some of my ex-employees work at Spotify, or Apple, or they work at Facebook. And they learned the expertise at our company and now they’re relationships that help us with all those companies. So for me, work’s always been about enjoying it, and teaching, and learning. You don’t know anything unless you ask questions. And that’s one of the hardest things for folks to do, because they become experts in silos. And what I try to teach the young folks is become a generalist because then you know how the company works, and then one day you’ll be an executive. And if you choose not to be an executive, what you could do is be a better expert because you know how each department will have your content or your ideas and how they would process it and use it.

Buzz Knight:

So who shaped you as a leader in your earliest days and then who is still influencing you in leadership these days?

Allen Kovac:

So I would say my mom, my dad died when I was 15 and he was very ill. When I was 14, I got a driver’s license, at 14, which meant I’d become very popular with women or girls at the time. And I was president of student council, did very well in school, played football, ran track, it’s Texas. And growing up in Texas with a mom that didn’t drive, a mother and father who were in the Holocaust and fought in two wars in Israel, and ended up with four boys and bailed when I was three and a half, four years old, all of a sudden we were in John Birch Society land. There was no NASA, there was no medical center, and you learn from that kind of adversity what’s important in life. And I was blessed with a mom that could focus me and that’s really what led to me going to the University of Oregon instead of an Ivy League school.

Allen Kovac:

She said to me, “Please do what you’d like to do, but you got to have a profession.” And I started laughing because for her, she had a son that was excelling and to go to an Ivy League school would’ve propelled me as a professional. And she told me that a lot, but she also said, “But if that takes away from what is going to keep you happy, make yourself happy.” So I went to the University of Oregon and a professor who was in Houston with my best friend, it was his father, and he really took a liking to me and gave me a book by a guy named Forrest Greeley, he was the first national forester. He created it. And I read the book and I just fell in love with Oregon, and on a whim, went with my friend Kevin to Oregon.

Allen Kovac:

And was very fortunate when I was in Oregon because I had a few skills from jobs I had to take on, because my mom didn’t drive, my brother and I both took jobs and I was putting up posters for a concert company. And I saw this book called Talent and Booking and I saw Peter Frampton on the cover and said, “Wow, you’ve got to stop booking Frank Sinatra, and Edie Gorme, and Sammy Davis Jr., you’ve got to book what we have at high school.” And he goes, “What do you have at high school?” I said, “You know, albums that are from Led Zeppelin, and The Who, and The Stones.” And he said, “Does everyone like that?” “Everyone I know.” So he books, his first one he could get was the Jefferson Airplane for, he did it with Pacifica, which was a public access company at the time back.

Buzz Knight:

WBAI, right? New York. Yep.

Allen Kovac:

Yes.

Buzz Knight:

Among other places. Yeah.

Allen Kovac:

He ultimately books Led Zeppelin and The Who. I got a raise because my mom told me not to tell him another act, unless he gives me a real job. And at 15, 14 years old, I was making $125 a week. She’d give me five bucks and she kept the rest, did the same thing with my brother. So then when I went to Oregon, I noticed there were no concerts between Portland and San Francisco. And I took a flyer and spent $1,250 on Tom Petty and sold it out. Met a guy named Stan Garrett from KZL Radio, who recently passed. I was lucky enough to at least speak with him, I hadn’t spoken to him for 40 plus years. And it was just great to reconnect with someone who taught me so much about record companies, and retailers, and broadcasters. And he was just one of the early, early FM radio pioneers coming out of San Francisco kind of knowledge base. So he was quite helpful.

Allen Kovac:

And one day I got in a Triumph Spitfire, drove down to LA, started meeting agents and saying to them, “University of Oregon, Oregon State, 65,000 kids with nothing to do, and you have a day off, I’m positive you don’t want to do that. You have to do that.” And long story short, they did. And then all of a sudden I’m getting yelled at by guys like Bill Graham and Frank Barcelona. And they’re yelling at me because I listened to my mom. She basically taught me early on if you don’t believe it, tell them and then you’ll learn or they will. But if you just keep it inside, you’re going to get very frustrated. And back then everyone was a shouter. These guys loved to scream and yell and that frightened me at the beginning, but then I learned how to yell back. And that made me really happy because being a 20 year old and getting yelled at by a legend or getting yelled at by a guy who controls everything from Bruce Springsteen to Talking Heads, and on it goes, and you’re getting yelled at.

Allen Kovac:

And most of it is an old boys network at the time. They wanted me to split the shows with more experienced promoters, and I refused. And I was lucky enough to be able to have a very sizeable concert company out of Eugene at an early age where I had to learn how to eat what I killed. Talk to adults, be responsible about P&L because there was no one to back me. The original money for Tom Petty was money I made in Eugene, and I’d saved it up.

Buzz Knight:

Just reinvested it.

Allen Kovac:

First show, and all of a sudden I’ve got more, so I’m booking Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Shaw. So when you’re in a small market, you’ve got to broaden the talent you’re bringing in or you’re going to over saturate it with one genre. So I got to meet Muddy Waters, meet Tom Petty, see him in an early stage, see him at a late stage, learn a lot about the industry. And there were all these great artist development guys at record companies,], Al Teller. I was a young guy and they would introduce me to Crystal Ship Records and you know Stan, but you know the other radio station?

Allen Kovac:

And they wanted me to bring their acts in, they wanted the college kids. So they taught me a lot. And ultimately, after building that company, I sold it and noticed that managers just were friends of the act. They didn’t have an expertise. They couldn’t sell a ticket. They didn’t understand how price and positioning worked or what a programmer needed to feel confident about playing a song. And I said, “Wow, if I create an infrastructure, publicity, sales, radio promotion, I could just own the management business.” And then within seven years I had the biggest management company in the world working with, first jazz, Jeff Lorber Fusion, Dan Siegel and Tom Grant. That’s all I could get. And they were from Eugene or Portland.

Buzz Knight:

With Jeff Lorber fusion, was a guy by the name of maybe Steve Leeds possibly working that one for you?

Allen Kovac:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Possibly.

Allen Kovac:

Steve and I have always remained close. I talked to his kids at the college he teaches at. Something I really love doing at NYU, UCLA, Syracuse, I just love kids coming in with this big aura of music and then popping their bubble.

Buzz Knight:

You want to stop here real quick, Allen, because sometimes people listening to Takin’ A Walk, they go, “Well, what was that noise in the background?” They start wondering whether it’s theater of the mind sound effects and we’re listening to the beautiful sound here of this gorgeous river. And I just had to acknowledge that it’s real, it’s not sound effects put in here by some cheesy sound effects record.

Allen Kovac:

Oh, so that’s your past life?

Buzz Knight:

Oh yeah, exactly. Well, listen, I mean, when you grew up listening to people like Bob and Ray and the theater of the mind that they used to use, yeah, you’re influenced if you’re me by that a little bit. And morning radio was part of my past as well. So yeah, we had all those tricks.

Allen Kovac:

So one of the other guys that really helped me out in LA is when I had a Dan Siegel record out and I went into a marketing meeting, there was A&R guy named Kenny Batiste, and a radio promo guy named Bernstein, and a bunch of other guys in the other areas of the company. And they had a one page, four paragraph marketing plan. So I look at that and I hand everyone a 24 page marketing plan, and it’s integrated marketing that they knew nothing about and cross promotion with partners. Like you know how everyone does features today?

Buzz Knight:

Yep.

Allen Kovac:

So I’ve got Lee Ritenour on a Dan Siegel record to help put a thumb on the scale to motivate them. Lee Ritenour was a big guitar player in jazz at the time, Chick Corea and Jeff Lorber. So the idea was to come in with that infrastructure of people that were working with me and elevate the performance of the record companies. So as Jeff Lorber gets a gold record, jazz, gold, what? All of a sudden I’m getting call from the Dazz Band, and now I’m managing an R&B artist. Dazz Band leads me to Meatloaf, Meatloaf leads me to the Bee Gees, Bee Gees lead me to Duran Duran, all word of mouth, “This guy’s got something no one else has.” And Joe Smith, early in that process with Dan Siegel said to me, “I want to take you to lunch. This is amazing. Can you go right now?” Now I’m in a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers and he takes me to Le Dome. Everyone’s wearing cuff links and a tie in the section he’s going and they give me the little boys jacket and I’m like so embarrassed.

Allen Kovac:

And he’s saying, “Don’t be embarrassed. You’re going to be a big time player.” And I said, “How do you know I’m going to be a big time player?” He said, “Let me tell you something. I’ve been in a lot of marketing meetings, I’ve never seen someone come in with a marketing plan like that. So I’m going to give you two bits of advice. First, I’m going to order some wine.” And he gets a Chateau Margaux Margaux in 1985 or ’86, a ’62, more money than I spent on Tom Petty. And he starts teaching me about wine. And he said, “Look, you’re going to be a great manager. So I’m going to tell you how this works. Don’t hang out with your bands, do what you’re doing. These guys that hang out, they’re miserable.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “Now when you do go see them, go see a show at the beginning of the tour and after. Always go where there’s a vineyard, meet the winemakers.” So he created a passion for me with wine, but he also gave me the reason I think I’m successful today.

Allen Kovac:

Relatively though, I’m not a billionaire like these guys all want to be billionaires. I never had dreams of doing that. My dream was never have a job and tried not to be stressed out. So long story short, we drink the wine. I’ve never had a glass of wine at 1:00 in the afternoon before, but I was having a glass of wine, 1:00 with the CEO of Elektra Records. And he said, “All right, here’s your next bit of advice. Carry this with you if you’re going to stay in the music business, be independent, stay away from the big lawyers, stay away from the big business managers, agents. Find the people who believe in what you’re doing and stay away from these other guys.” I go, “Why would I do that? These guys are the guys that run the music business.”

Allen Kovac:

He said, “Yeah, and here’s what they do.” And he had Geffen and Azoff off at the time at Elektra Records and couldn’t stand them because they all had to fight about something, either The Eagles, or Fleetwood Mac, something, they were always fighting. So he was very resentful that day, and he names them very clearly to me, he said, “Stay away from them. Stay away from Branca and Grubman. He used names, and I’m like, “Oh my God, this guy is really upset.” So anyway, long story short, I’ve remained independent my whole career, based on that advice and his, the succinct advice was, “They all know each other. You’re Rosa Parks, you’re in the back of the bus, you got here in the ’80s, they’ve been here since the ’60s. Their relationships become poison and gossip. And the only thing they care about is making the artists insecure so they can take them from you.”

Allen Kovac:

And I’m listening to that. And it still happens today. The lawyers, business managers love control, but they don’t know anything about the industry. They’re supposed to be reading and counting. Well, they can’t read or count, they’re agents. They think they know more than the managers, and rightfully so in many cases, but they really hate when they’re not in control. So he was so right. And I’ve been able to work with the same lawyers and business managers and feel great about working with a guy like Dennis Arfa for 35 years, working with Tim Mandelbaum, who I met with Richard Marks in 1987. And to have those kind of business relationships without gossip and BS, but focus on what you can do for the artist, gives me an edge because I’m not spending my time with drama. I’m spending my time with like-minded people.

Buzz Knight:

I love it. I mean, I know Steve Kline and have great respect for Steve, your COO, right?

Allen Kovac:

Yes.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. And he’s always had this calm attitude about things where there’s so many people in the business that make you edgy and nervous just when they walk into the room. So I think you carry that on and pass that on to guys like Steve, for sure and other folks in your organization. But you really look at Better Noise as really a content company, right? Really when you come down to it.

Allen Kovac:

Exactly. So the industry has been affected by finance and money and quarterly billing puts a lot of pressure on companies. So in the ’90s, late ’80s you started to see Polygram aggregate independent labels. You saw MCA become Universal and aggregate,. So now you’re in a business where people have to manufacture music to hit quarters. Songwriters are more important, producers are more important, and artists are just dangling around, waiting for the label to give them the song. And that’s why you see a lot, a dearth of talent on that stage. You see a lot of dancers, you see a lot of visual, but just listen to the person with the mic and think about all the great stars, and then look at how many average artists there are, but they made quarters with a song. So I saw that the record companies weren’t involved enough with film, television, rock, and alternative music.

Allen Kovac:

They’ve turned alternative into pop now, so it’s hard for me, you have to hire private investigator to tell me if they’re pop artists or they’re alternative artists. When I grew up alternative meant Patti Smith, or Talking Heads, I’m listening to this stuff and I’m going, “Manufactured pop.” So I saw a dearth in that space of rock music and said to my bands, “Hey, Papa Roach, you on Interscope, you had a number one single and they wanted their resources at alternative and rock, and they wanted their resources for another act, so you went bye bye. How about we do it with you? And then you know you’re going to get back on track.” So anyway, we had, with that band five albums, 20 top 10 singles, and their career was reignited. And then all of a sudden everyone was calling us, not just the bands that we manage, but outside.

Allen Kovac:

And now we’re the number one rock label in the world with offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Toronto, LA, and New York. And we started out with three people, me, Steve, and a label manager. We now have over 100. So I’m very happy about the concept of being able to have and visualize something and work backwards from your end game. So the end game was to bring rock back as an important genre, and when you get a band like Five Finger Death Punch that gets platinum records in 2022, doing metal hard rock and you can get a band from Mongolia called The Hu, and they’re going to go gold. And you’re saying to yourself, “Wow, I’m going to have an act for the next 20 years. This isn’t manufactured. This is, makes me happy. And it shows younger people that you can be patient.”

Allen Kovac:

We call ourselves the artist development company because we use ticketing, we use social media, YouTube, before we go to streaming, we gather the data then we send that to the streaming services. We don’t push them for a playlist, we have them tell us. Once we’ve seen that we go to radio. And if you talk to Brian Phillips or Troy at Cumulus, or you talk to Brad at iHeart, the one thing they’ll tell you is Allen Kovac won’t go for a record that doesn’t have engagement. If the audience doesn’t like it, he won’t keep going. He doesn’t push us into playing. He doesn’t pay the Indies for overnight spins. He won’t play the game. Now I wish I could say labels have learned that with us, right now we have three records in the top 10, by July, we’ll have four or five. We’ve always had three to five records in the top 10 and we do it strictly with data.

Allen Kovac:

I refuse to let my folks hype me, the artist, or themselves. And that’s something I’m lucky enough to have gotten into. I told you earlier, my mom always told me to ask questions and learn. So I met this guy named Kurt Hanson who did research for radio and MTV and VH1. And I can’t remember the name of the woman who worked with him, but I went to their offices in Chicago and I said, “Show me how this works.” And they showed me, and I’m like, “Wow. So you can actually find out what the audience wants, not just what you think.” And they said, “Yes, the radio audience is what we find.” And then he showed me marbles in a pool and the basics of research. And I started using that in radio. That’s how I met you.

Allen Kovac:

That’s how I met. A lot of programmers, was through talking to them about my records from the point of view of your research, not mine. Not my hype, not my enthusiasm, but this is your audience and it’s working. So that led me to Keith Reinhard at DDB. He’s the guy that put the baby in the tire. He knew how to send branding messages through visual, and whether it was Ronald McDonald so that teenagers weren’t just at McDonald’s, but the moms brought the whole family and the kids. He was a genius. And he has a book at Wharton and all the business schools that people read. But I was so lucky to have a joint venture with him. And we bought all the media for the music business for about three years. And then I said, “Wait a minute. I want to compete with these guys. Why am I doing this for them?”

Allen Kovac:

So I called up Keith and I said, “I don’t think we need to do this anymore.” He goes, “Well, it’s a fraction of my business, but I do like it. You’re enthusiastic, you got an office here. You bring us ideas in the entertainment space.” I said, “I know, but I want to go back to LA.” And immediately I started restructuring the company. So we do something that he taught us called an ROI, relevance, originality, and impact. And what that teaches you is how to look at the data, how to describe where you want to go. And then how you’re going to get there with the answers to the question. And ultimately you have a phrase for branding and that branding statement’s a call to action for the audience.

Allen Kovac:

So those are the men and many women have helped me as well. My mom, but also women in the business affair side of music have been extremely helpful to me because they give me a different point of view. They showed me how they had to perform their job and what their company needed from the standpoint of a recording contract. And I was able to, from that, learn how to get Motley Crue their masters back the Bee Gees, Saturday Night Fever. So I was one of the few managers that got rights back for artists because of these wonderful women.

Allen Kovac:

I’m not going to name them because I don’t want their bosses to get rid of them, but let’s put it this way, they were so good to me with their time. And they found it intriguing that I was interested. And then even when we were on opposite sides, they had more emotional intelligence than the men. The men would be, “You’re not loyal. You’re an asshole.” Screaming, yelling. The women would say, “Well, unfortunately we can’t do that.” And then I used the experience I had from them to realize all I had to do was wait for a quarter. And if I waited for the right moment, I could dangle them some product and they’d rather do what was best for them and their bonus than what was good for the company. And I used that kind of avarice to do a lot of things that people weren’t doing at the time.

Buzz Knight:

So the heart and soul of your company is something that I want to talk about, and specifically around some of the work going on, as an example, Sno Babies, that project, the project certainly with Nikki Sixx and The Heroin Diaries, which we want to talk about as well. The heart and soul of doing something to help people and have a voice. Talk to me how that has evolved and why that’s important to you.

Allen Kovac:

Well, it’s important to me because fans and people in the industry don’t realize what a terrible job it is to be an artist, the anxiety of not knowing whether someone’s going to buy a ticket, or your music, or your t-shirt, not knowing if your song’s going to be liked by the record company, being in a bus or a van. Doing a show, you’re playing for an hour, two hours, you got to get in the bus after your adrenaline’s going, and your endorphins are rolling, and it’s already midnight, so you’re not going to get much sleep. And they go to alcohol and they go to barbiturates, but then they have to get up and do an interview for a radio station. And that’s at 7:00 in the morning, they got to get up at 6:00, but they’ve only had three hours sleep. And then they do the interview, they do the acoustic show, and they all wired again and they have to go back to sleep, and they try, but they can’t, broken sleep if they’re getting any at all.

Allen Kovac:

And then it’s time to go to the venue there’s load in, and there’s sound check, and then there’s the meet and greet, and then they’re back on stage. Now, if you’re doing that five, six times a week, it’s going to really affect you. And for whatever, whatever reason, the lack of empathy for these folks who work hard, people say that I work hard, I don’t work hard, they do. And that caused me to be active in the music community about addiction, helping artists. I’ve never had an artist die on my watch. I’ll get rid of an artist if they don’t want to get help, so they can get help. And that’s worked for me, a lot of managers that like their artists on the road, the way we do it is an artist can only play so many shows and then they got to have a long break.

Allen Kovac:

And that is counter to maximizing your income. But you can manage Blondie for 30 years, or Motley Crue, if you do it that way. You can manage an act for a few years in the short term and have a Kurt Cobain. Whoever that management company was, they knew he was a heroin addict. They knew that he had issues and whether it was the record company, or the radio station, or the in-store, no one cared, they cared about themselves. So I wanted to get the word out and I did it with multiple artists, watched them get well and started getting them active in that community to give back and help. So a guy like Nikki Sixx writes a book called The Heroin Diaries, creates a band called 6:00 AM as a soundtrack to it. And he puts himself in a position where he’s willing to show his flaws and talk about what he did to help himself. And to me, that’s so important because you get a 66 year old guy like me talking to you, that’s one thing, but when Nikki talks to you, it’s a whole different thing for an artist. When Debbie Harry talks to you, it’s a different conversation. And the more artists we can do that with, the better it will be for the artist’s community.

Buzz Knight:

Well, I know one of the things too that you’ve talked about is, when you sign on with somebody and when they sign on with you, you really don’t want to, I guess be their friend, you just want to be the straight voice of reason and guide them, and help them, and collaborate with them. But I watched the interview that you did with Nikki talking specifically about The Heroin Diaries, and my observation is you are extremely proud of him for what he’s doing, what he’s done, his honesty and the voice that he’s trying to give. So the relationship seems like it’s now a different relationship. Is that fair to say?

Allen Kovac:

I’d say it is, but I still, and Nikki knows this, he always says to me, “I know I’m not your friend, but I’m the closest thing you got to one as an artist.” So he understands that distinction. Only two artists have ever been to my home up here in Litchfield, Nikki Sixx and Debbie Harry, she bought a place up here and I love seeing her at 76, have the passion and the focus of her art, but also being able to get out here in her place in New Jersey, mindfulness and the ability to clear your mind allows a 76 year old to go sell out concerts in the UK last week. And I’m proud of her. I’m proud of Nikki, that said, you can count your friends on one hand. Who’s going to be there when you have a baby, for instance?

Allen Kovac:

Well, we had community here and I was not working for three weeks, waking up in the middle of the night, but then I had to go on a trip and my wife had a different woman cook dinner, help her out every day I was gone. That can’t happen in New York or LA. So being in community is more important to me than counting how many contacts or friends I have. And that’s hard for some people, some artists feel I’m a snob, that they’ve even told me, “What kind of snob are you? You’re my friend.” I said, “I’m not, I’m the guy that tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.” And that pushes them back a little bit, but ultimately, you get a degree of reverence, no matter how much they want to fight about that, there’s a degree of reverence when you separate your business life from your social life. And it’s really worked for me. Some people can’t untether from the friendship, and I do.

Buzz Knight:

Well, they always know where they stand, so they know you’re going to shoot them straight. And at its core, that’s what anybody ever wants, right? They want to know the real deal.

Allen Kovac:

You would hope.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. Not everybody, you’re right, you would hope. The heroin diaries and the creation of it to be a musical is certainly one of the most ambitious projects and tremendous projects at its core. How is all of that going? What’s the status of it and the build out of it because it’s a tremendous, a tremendous project?

Allen Kovac:

Well, the, believe it or not, I was on a boat going to see Richard Branson. He gave me an award and he suckered me in, I don’t do those things. And he somehow decides that my wife’s English, and if he could be the guy that gave me the award, then I’d show up, and I passed. So I remember when the Association of Independent Music Labels called me up and said, “Do you want this award?” And I said, “No, I’m happy.”

Buzz Knight:

This was the innovation award, right?

Allen Kovac:

Yeah, the innovator.

Buzz Knight:

Innovator.

Allen Kovac:

And so he, he was funny. He decides that he’s going to put his thumb on the scale and my wife and her parents, “How could you not come?” Well, I’ve never accepted any of these, even when I got an Emmy for the Meatloaf documentary. I had someone pick it up, that’s the United States. And they said, “No, no, you have to come.” So I came, expecting to see Richard again, which was more important to me than the award. And I had done Bat Out of Hell with him, Bat Two. And I remember his company said, “Wow, this guy hasn’t had a hit in 15 years and he’s had four or five records that sold 150,000. And you’re coming in with this marketing plan?” And there’s a guy named Paul Conroy who worked for Richard, and he looks at everyone in the room, he goes, “Well, have we ever brought retail, and radio, and the industry press, and everyone into a theater? He’s named it Bat Two. He wants all these people in a room and he’s got Jim Steinman that’s going to introduce Meatloaf to say they’re back together. And Bat Out of Hell Two is as good as Bat One, listen to it. And if you agree, help us.”

Allen Kovac:

He goes, “When have we ever done that?” And all of a sudden, Richard Branson is the man who sells 25 million records and sells his company a few years later, makes a lot of money, and he’s a real innovator and knows how to create and run businesses. Something I couldn’t do. I don’t know how he does it on the scale that he does it, but he lives on two islands and somehow manages it. So being Richard Branson isn’t that bad. But what he did that was really funky was he sends a video, he’s in flip flops, shorts, and a t-shirt and he goes on and on about my career.

Allen Kovac:

And then I find out he wants to see me at Necker. So I go to Necker and COVID happens. So he had come back from Italy and him and his wife were, at best, contemplating whether they had COVID, and at worst assume they had COVID. And he said, “You got to get out of here.” And I’ve never flown private, my bands take me private, labels do, but I’m not that bougie. I can fly business or first and be just as happy. And I like the whole experience of going to an airport it’s, to me, something that I’ve done for my whole life. So I took a private plane because the folks that were on the boat were totally freaked out from Branson’s conversation. And when I got back, I said to Nikki, “Nikki, we’re going to have to wait on this musical. It’s too important to you, and me, and the Global Recovery Initiative that we’re working with to make this opiate crisis top of mind.”

Allen Kovac:

Well, obviously COVID became top of mind and putting on a musical wasn’t going to happen. So where we are now is, we have the director, the writer wrote the book, we had the actors, everything ready to go, and all the investors were paid back. I paid back every investor, whether it was Live Nation and Michael Rapino, or it was Dennis Arfa, gave them all their money and said, “When it comes up again, you choose whether or not you want to lose money. But this circumstance I brought you into and I’ll pay the bill.” And that’s something people don’t do in the music business.

Allen Kovac:

When I make a mistake, I don’t say it was your money. I say, “It’s my money.” And that’s how you get relationships. So Nikki is set to do the musical when it’s time. Right now the only musicals that are happening are branded, Lion King. There’s a new Billions that’s going to be made. So if it’s a brand, you can make it happen. So it’ll probably happen in a couple of years. It won’t happen now, it was kind of depressing to me, to see such an important work not happening, but in between then we did The Dirt, which was great publicity.

Buzz Knight:

Congratulations. Yeah. What a amazing story. Boy.

Allen Kovac:

84 million people, 16 years to make. Thank God for Rick Yorn helping us make it happen. By the way, people think I make these films, I do the marketing, I read the script, I help use data to get the actors, but I do, I never go on the set. So we just did a movie called The Retaliators with 12 of our artists in it. They all kept asking me, “Am I going to see you?” And I said, “This isn’t my expertise. Do I hang out in the studio?”

Allen Kovac:

And they say, “Well, you used to, why don’t you hang out with us?” And I said, “Because I can now talk to you because of hanging out in the studio about a verse, pre chorus, chorus, bridge, melody lyric, and I can do it over the phone because of something called technology. I don’t need to go sit in a studio with you for days in, days out like I did with Bruce Fairbairn or Quincy Jones. They taught me, I’ll teach you. But if you know everything, you don’t even need the phone call to send me the music, it’ll be your art and your career.” And it works real well when you say it can be your art and your career, but I won’t give you any input unless you want it. They want your input because they see you’re not doing it for ego.

Buzz Knight:

The joy of the art, right?

Allen Kovac:

Yeah. I love having people around the world tell me, “There’s no way you’re going to get a Mongolian band on our radio station.” Or a retailer saying, “Are you kidding me? They don’t even speak English.” I just love proving them wrong on Bat Out of Hell Two, or the Bee Gees where we did a one night only special on HBO and syndicated around the world, and they’re back in stadiums after being in disco prison. So for me, what keeps me excited about what I do are those things. Being able to get a band named Five Finger Death Punch to go platinum. It’s awesome. And what would I rather do, crochet? Or work as a analyst? Or be one of these financial engineers that creates nothing but rings out a few percentage points out of cash? Not what I thrive to do in my life.

Buzz Knight:

But you really view that you’ve never really had a job.

Allen Kovac:

I’ve never had a job.

Buzz Knight:

I mean, I love that.

Allen Kovac:

It makes you independent and you can speak your mind. You’re not going to get fired, and it teaches you empathy. You’re not in a gig where you go, “It’s not my problem.” Everything’s your problem if you own the company, from finance, to HR, to strategy, to supply chain. And I just loved learning Rob Glaser had a technology where you could hear on your computer sound. And I was like, “What?” And then some guy named Mark Cuban shows up and these two young guys like me are talking all about the future. So I just absorbed it and hung out with him, introduced him to the record companies who tried to stop it. And I’m like, “You guys are crazy. Someone’s going to do this and they’re going to run away with your music.” Hence MySpace. But I had them in the room with Tommy Mottola who said to me, “You’re going to take all the magic away.”

Allen Kovac:

And I said, “What?” He goes, “You know, the magic of an album, the magic of my ears, making that album, you know, this research, and this sound scan, and BDS, and all this crap you brought in the business. What makes me special is my ears and my gut.” I couldn’t stop laughing. And then you have guys like Strauss Zelnick who, a Harvard educated guy, running BMG, and he wants to get involved in it. And then he has a coup with the old guys, Rudy Gaster, who was international, Clive, all these guys tried to pile on him. And I think he would’ve innovated the industry. I’ll tell it, ready to do it. He was ready to buy half of Progressive Networks at the time so he could distribute sound on the internet. He gets bumped off. So that now I’m strike three going to three major CEOs. So I go to Cupertino and I said, “Can I meet the engineers? The people that program the algorithms. I think we need an audio jukebox.” And Steve, he doesn’t get credit because the other Steve was gone.

Allen Kovac:

The guy that was running it had been the CEO of Pepsi in Steve’s absence. So Jobs comes back from Pixar, Steve is no longer there because he cleaned house with all of the Pepsi dudes, people. And all of a sudden he finds out about this and he created something called downloads, and music started to be able to sell on the internet. And on it goes, I met the Google guys, I wanted to know how their platform worked. I met the Facebook guy and I want to know how his platform worked. I always talked to the engineers because I don’t know anything. And thank God for my mom because I learned a lot. And in the music business, algorithmic marketing is still strange to people.

Allen Kovac:

I tell people they have to unlearn if they come to our company because they’re all stuck with single album tour and I’m like, “Come on, it’s a global internet. What are we talking about here?” And you can keep people as long as they want to learn. And then you got to decide cost benefit of keeping them around if they don’t. What does that do to morale for people who do? So I’ve been very fortunate to find guys like Steve Kline, Joe McFadden is a great example. He came into a staff meeting. He was the head of sales at Capital and EMI for two decades. And I worked with him on Duran Duran, and Richard Marx, and several other artists. And he came into the company and he comes into a staff meeting after I had made a presentation about what we were going to do to move the company into a new era. And he said, “All right, here’s price and positioning, and here’s the circulars I’m going to do.”

Allen Kovac:

And I said, “Joe, I’m only going to tell you this three times in your life. This is the first.” And we record our staff meetings so everyone can learn, especially the young folks. So Joe, who’s my age, back then he would’ve been 50 something, comes in a second time and he goes, “All right, here’s my price and positioning and here’s the circulars I’m buying.” I said, “Joe, I’m going to tell you one more time after this. Bottom line is, all that money’s being used for social media and data. The different departments I don’t give an F about retail. They’re going to go away.”

Allen Kovac:

He was like, “What?” And I said, “Look at Amazon, it’s going to go away. So either if you want to stay here, come up with a new title. Maybe that will help you project a different vibe.” Apparently he comes in with chief consumption officer, never mentioned it again. And he’s the guy that deals with Apple, and Amazon, and Spotify for us. And he’s an amazing talent. That’s a guy who unlearned, and then you got kids that know everything because they worked at Sony, or Universal, or Warners and they’re used to quick. And we built fan base. The artist development comes from fans and it comes from identifying those fans and then storytelling to that audience. And if you’re interested in shortcuts, you’re not right for our company. Because like I said, our artists are going to have 20, 30, 40, 50 year careers, not three years.

Buzz Knight:

So last question I have to ask you, foreshadow where you see the music business at large in two years, what’s going to be happening in your opinion?

Allen Kovac:

Well, I think Spotify and Netflix are going to become a bundle. They can’t compete individually with Apple or Google. I think the major record companies and all these folks buying IP would’ve overpaid as the great Millennials take over and our generation goes away, everyone dies, you’re going to die, I’m going to die, so are they. And they’re buying these catalogs for half a billion dollars because of multiples. Well, when interest rates come up, the leverage of that money isn’t going to work. And then what happens? Same thing that happens with housing. Everything bombs. That’s going to cause the major labels to rethink their business model and develop artists that are going to have 20, 30, 40 year careers. Is every artist?

Allen Kovac:

I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to, so if you’re a hip hop fan, and you are hormonal, and you’re 12 to 24, you might rhyme to putting a cap up someone’s ass, but once you get a job, and you start getting on Prime to get diapers, are you really going to be that angry? Or are you going to be happy about your kid? Or you’re married? You’re no longer pissed because your friends didn’t talk to you for a day. And I love you, you love me on the pop side, you get burned, you end up in a situation where, “Well, I thought he loved me, but he took my friend out and he laid her instead.” So you write about those things as people get older and that’s how. And issues, I think issues, once we get through this horrible place we are in the world right now with aristocracy and autocrats, where they feed off of each other. We’re going to be talking about the kinds of things that Bob Dylan talked about or that Crosby, Stills, Nash talked about.

Allen Kovac:

I mean, look what’s happening in Ukraine right now, or look what’s happening in America. Where today it was leaked that the Supreme court is going to outlaw abortion. Now what’s that about? Politicians on tape lying and still holding their seats. It’s okay to lie. So these norms, I believe in a couple of years, are going to get back on track because it’s not normal for a country to just walk in and blow up innocent civilians, to do what? To prove you’ve still got an empire. I think if the UK did that, they used to have us, and Australia, and Canada, and India. Well, they gave it up. This guy, he knows how to divide. And I think the music business, just like with artists speaking about their issues, the music business has a moral reason to use their lyrics, to change things. And it’s right now.

Allen Kovac:

So between the consolidation of platforms and the industry reshaping itself for the long term, and finance getting the hell out of the music business, I think we’re going to have a different business in a couple of years. I think we’re going to have a big recession. And after recessions new things happen. In ’07 I started a record company. It’s now the number one rock label in Billboard. So I think that’s what’s going to happen. I think there’s going to be change. And guys like us need to be able to speak out so that we’re not just silent. We’re saying it’s not okay to lie on tape and then tell people that’s okay. Or be a finance guy and say, “Well, I’m a centrist. I don’t like big government.” But isn’t big government outlawing abortion? Isn’t that political?

Allen Kovac:

“I don’t want to pay taxes.” Is what they ought to say. But when you don’t pay taxes, you don’t reeducate the uneducated who’ve lost their trade to China or Mexico. And if you don’t speak out, then how do you change things? How do you get our airports, if you don’t pay taxes, to the point where they look like France’s airports, or even Ukraine’s airports? How do you fix the roads? Look at this trail we’re on, this is a road now, and look at it. There’s no state and federal money for it, because no one pays taxes, they’re all going to Florida if they’re billionaires. And Florida’s advertising, “Hey, come to Florida. We’re crazier than anywhere else you’ve been, but you won’t have to pay taxes and you can now finance it for us.”

Buzz Knight:

Oh, Allen Kovac. I love talking to you about life, about the music business, about your passions, but I really love the heart and soul that you bring to it all, which is so important now, the truth, and the authenticity. And I just can’t thank you enough for taking this walk. It means so much to me.

Allen Kovac:

Well, I’m really grateful that I have the opportunity and that you have a podcast that people can hear. And hopefully this conversation helps people that want to get into the music business look at things from a different perspective. So thank you very much.

Buzz Knight:

I’m very grateful. Thank you, Allen.

Allen Kovac:

You’re welcome.

Speaker 2:

Takin’ A Walk with Buzz Knight is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.