"Bring me STARS!"  That’s what the Sony brass told Tim Devine.  So he walked.

Used to be you were dying to get IN!  Now those with jobs want to get OUT!

Tim Devine is the weasel’s weasel.  The kind of guy made for the major label.  Sidling up to you as a friend but ultimately doing that which will benefit HIS career.  The benevolent friend who’s not a friend at all.  When business is involved, anyway.  And isn’t it all business.  When Tim Devine walks, you know it’s all over.

Then there’s Phil Costello.  The promotion man’s promotion man.  The kind of prick who’d call you up and start yelling at the top of his lungs so loud and for so long that you could go to the kitchen, make a sandwich and EAT IT and when you came back on the line, he’d still be ranting.  One word in response was enough to get him started again.  And when it was all over, he’d forgotten he reamed your ass, after all, it was all in a day’s work.

Tim and Phil sold their souls to the company man.  They’re not entrepreneurs.  They’re salaried men with expense accounts.  Ultimately beholden to a faceless man signing their checks.  And not giving a shit about it.  Selling out was not an issue.  Where did they SIGN??

And now they’re gone.

Tim Devine resurrected Bonnie Raitt’s career.  I won’t exactly say single-handedly, but he’s the man responsible.  And he believed in and broke Train when his corporate superiors wanted nothing to do with the act and wanted to bury it.  Tim is smart, and tenacious, and committed.  The kind of guy you want on your team.  If you’ve got a team.  But Sony is no longer a team.  It’s a few dictators and common folk, doing what they’re told because they’re fearful of entering the big bad world and finding out with their skills they can only get a job for cents on the dollar.  I don’t know what Tim does now.  John Kalodner can’t seem to work.  But give the man props.  Hearing that Sony was not interested in artist development, not interesting in doubles as opposed to grand slams, he marched off.

Radio promotion isn’t even the same business anymore.  What with Spitzer and tighter playlists and declining listenership.  Sure, radio is where you reach the most people, but it’s not where it’s at.  It’s happening on the Internet.  Just ask the target audience, in front of their screens all day.

In the early nineties every mid-level manager closed his shop and went to work for the label.  Now, the exodus is in REVERSE!  All the old execs in the U.K. are now managers.  Hell, the managers are STRONGER than the labels.  And Phil Costello has jumped from the Reprise ship to work for John Silva.  Used to be that management was a license to starve, if your act got cold, you couldn’t afford to eat.  Now the manager commissions a plethora of revenue streams, not only recorded music, and he’s got some control, he can decide whether to put his foot on the gas or let up, he has a modicum of power regarding his act’s longevity.  Whereas the label, not having this connection, rapes and pillages at all times, only worrying about today.

Once again, the story is not about stealing music.  Rather it’s how those in charge at the major labels, through sheer greed and ineptitude, and short-sightedness, didn’t see the future, ignored it when confronted with it and kept yelling that everybody should come back to the past.

Tim Devine wanted to break acts.  Sony wanted to break records.

Phil Costello wanted to have an impact, his options were limited in the corporate halls.

So they both jumped ship.

And their hypothetical replacements, the twentysomethings, NEVER had an interest in working for the man.