The legendary record man didn’t want to leave the label he co-founded. He also predicted a major issue with the new-fangled format that supplanted vinyl.
I was sure Moss would be too embarrassed to rehash this history, because, eventually, the CD helped him and his partner, trumpeter, become super rich, selling A&M to PolyGram for $500 million in 1989. But the exec who co-founded A&M with Alpert in a garage in 1962, after selling the master for Alpert’s Tijuana Brass instrumental “Tell It to the Birds” for $750, quickly agreed to a phone interview – and a wonkier follow-up later.
“I made a bit of a small statement at the meeting,” understated Moss, who at the time of our interview was running his post-A&M label, Almo Sounds, which had signed Gillian Welch as well as Garbage and Imogen Heap. “I liked the hardware and the whole ease of the CD, and I generally applauded the idea that Sony and Philips were getting together on this one piece of machinery.What finally turned Moss around was the economics of the CD. The price of vinyl records was stuck at $8.
“The retailers wanted more and artists and producers wanted more for what they were doing. The record companies were getting squeezed further and further,” Moss went on. “And here comes the CD.” The shiny, futuristic format was in high demand, and retailers were willing to buy it from labels for $10 wholesale, far higher than the LP, then sell it to customers for $16.Like the bigger labels, A&M had to find plants to manufacture the CD, quickly making a deal with a German company.
“I don’t regret selling, because I felt we had nothing but to do that. There was no alternative. We would have had to have gotten a lot smaller, and gotten our investment in different, other ways,” Moss told me. “I can’t say I’m sorry I sold A&M. I will say I’m sorry I had to leave.”
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