December 27, 2011

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Ducking through a crowd of tourists at Rockefeller Center, the singer Cee Lo Green took a breather during rehearsals for NBC’s annual tree-lighting concert on Nov. 30. But between a shopping detour at Swarovski Crystal and last-minute talks with the show’s producer, there wasn’t much time to rest.

It’s a pace that Cee Lo, as he is also known, is accustomed to. In the last year, he has won a Grammy Award for a song that became a blockbuster hit despite its unprintable title (officially bowdlerized as “Forget You”), become a celebrity judge on NBC’s talent show “The Voice” and, through a calculated media blitz orchestrated by his managers, broken through as a face of mainstream pop culture after nearly two decades as a cult figure.

To sustain his success, Cee Lo has become one of the hardest-working stars in pop. In the days around the tree-lighting schedule he logged about 20,000 miles taping television shows, recording an album and making personal appearances across the United States and in Britain. One day last spring he managed a promotional trifecta, performing in New York in the morning, Alabama in the afternoon and Las Vegas at night.

“I’m still just a working-class artist, basically,” Cee Lo said of his schedule, as he waited backstage at Rockefeller Center for some hot tea to soothe his well-traveled vocal cords.

Cee Lo — a cannonball-shaped man devoted to the Liberace and Elton John school of showmanship — will earn about $20 million this year. Record sales represent the smallest slice of the revenue pie, according to Larry Mestel, the chief executive of Cee Lo’s management company, Primary Wave Music.

The collapse in record sales over the last decade has decimated the bottom line, and a hit song alone is no longer enough to bring in superstar wealth.

So even musicians with multiplatinum success have started looking elsewhere for income, especially to increased touring and the kind of commercial deals that result in Miracle Whip product placement in Lady Gaga videos and Taylor Swift’s performing at a JetBlue airport terminal.

A look at the numbers shows how the economics of music stardom have changed. Born Thomas Callaway, Cee Lo first struck gold in 2005 as producer and co-writer of the Pussycat Dolls’ hit “Don’t Cha”; the next year Gnarls Barkley, his duo with the producer Danger Mouse, reached No. 1 around the world with “Crazy.”

Those hits brought Cee Lo an industry perch but little mainstream name recognition. The pattern might have continued with his third solo album, “The Lady Killer,” which had a modest opening at No. 9 when released late last year by Elektra. By then, however, “Forget You” had already snowballed from an online novelty hit into a pop culture phenomenon, with Gwyneth Paltrow singing it on “Glee.”

“Forget You,” released in August 2010, reached No. 2 and has sold 5.3 million downloads in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, making it the 12th most downloaded track of all time. (By comparison, Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” the top song of 2011, has sold 5.7 million.)

But today even extraordinary sales numbers like those translate to limited financial success.

A chart-topping single could once be counted on to drive big sales of full albums, which bring in greater royalties. But the “unbundling” of albums in the age of iTunes — the loss of album sales at $10 or $15 when consumers can buy a single song for about $1 — has contributed to a 58 percent reduction in album sales since 2000. Despite the success of “Forget You,” “The Lady Killer” has sold only about 450,000 copies in the United States.

“How much do you make on five million singles?” Mr. Mestel asked. “It’s not $5 million. Apple takes a piece of it, the record company takes a piece of it, the producer takes a piece of it, and then Cee Lo gets a piece of it as the artist.”

A recording contract for an act like Cee Lo would typically offer a net royalty of about 15 percent, according to several music executives.

That means that for a $1.29 download from iTunes, after Apple takes its standard 30 percent fee, the artist would be paid 13 or 14 cents; for five million downloads, that amounts to about $650,000. As one of five writers of the song, Cee Lo would also make about $45,000 in publishing royalties on those downloads.

[Edited 12/27/11 7:41am]

Part II

That leaves him a long way from the $20 million he is estimated to make this year. So to help establish Cee Lo as a household name, Primary Wave has over the last year arranged a steady series of TV appearances and endorsement deals that trade on the singer’s sense of pageantry, good humor and musical catholicity — his “brand.”

The company is made up of many former major-label record executives who have learned to push for unusual marketing strategies. Jeff Straughn, chief executive of the Brand Synergy Group, a partnership with Primary Wave, developed the mini-Elle magazine — featuring actual paid ads — that doubled as the liner notes to Mariah Carey’s last album.

Cee Lo describes Mr. Mestel and Primary Wave with characteristic impromptu poetry: “I would describe Larry as a picket fence around my garden of wildflowers.”

The company was set up in 2006 as a music publisher when it paid an estimated $50 million for a 50 percent stake in the Kurt Cobain song catalog, an anchor that brought in Hall & Oates, Gregg Allman, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, Def Leppard and others. Primary Wave now controls the copyrights to about 10,000 songs — a minuscule catalog compared with giant music publishers like EMI and Universal, but the company has also established marketing, branding, television and artist management units to exploit songs to their fullest.

In September, Primary Wave’s talent management division merged with Violator, one of the top hip-hop and R&B management companies, adding to its roster major acts like 50 Cent, Busta Rhymes and LL Cool J.

“Most publishing companies look at the world as a place to collect,” Mr. Mestel said. “They hire lots of accountants and royalty people and wait for opportunities to come in. Even though the biggest piece of our company is publishing, we are a marketing and branding company.”

To promote the Hall & Oates catalog, Primary Wave developed an irreverent online cartoon called “J-Stache,” which, like Gogol’s nose, follows the exploits of John Oates’s signature bushy mustache. Once Joe Elliott of Def Leppard heard about it he made a deal for the group’s publishing rights.

“What usually happens when a band signs with a company,” Mr. Elliott said, “is that two years down the road it all goes wrong. But these guys seem to actually sweat for their part. They’re a publishing company, but they’re actively out there working the stuff, banging on doors.”

When Primary Wave took over Cee Lo’s management, shortly before the release of “The Lady Killer,” he still had a relatively low profile as a solo artist. But the company seized on the early viral success of “Forget You” to make Cee Lo a ubiquitous face.

His over-the-top performances at half a dozen award shows — performing with the Jim Henson Company puppets at the Grammys, playing a piano that spun 360 degrees above the crowd at the Billboard awards — proved highly successful.

His television campaign for the year has also included “Saturday Night Live,” an appearance on the NBC comedy-drama “Parenthood” and his own talk show on the cable channel Fuse (“Talking to Strangers”).

Primary Wave also booked numerous commercial endorsements for Cee Lo, in traditional TV spots like a 7Up commercial that has been running since October, as well as a Web video series for Absolut Vodka and personal appearances for Duracell and Pretzel M&M’s.

“He has a very strong brand, an unusual look and a great sense of fun,” said Mark Burnett, the veteran reality-TV producer, who signed up Cee Lo for “The Voice” shortly after seeing him on “Saturday Night Live.” “It’s a sense of theatrical, big-scale fun. It’s not just singing. It’s a real show with Cee Lo.”

More television is on its way. Backstage at the last night of “The Voice” last June, he signed a contract with Mr. Burnett for a reality show on British television, “Cee Lo Takes the U.K.,” on which his old group, the Goodie Mob, records a reunion album in London and soaks up the local customs. And next year Cee Lo will follow Celine Dion and Prince to Las Vegas with “Loberace,” a theatrical show to be presented at Planet Hollywood.

With his schedule and his association with various companies and products, Cee Lo inevitably faces two risks: overcommitment and overexposure. After “The Voice” became unexpectedly successful, he had to pull out of a tour with Rihanna.

Overexposure may be hard to judge for an industry that relies on as much promotion as possible. But despite the array of companies Cee Lo has worked with, his representatives say they have guarded his integrity. (“You don’t know how many deals I’ve turned down,” Mr. Straughn said.)

For Cee Lo, turning himself into a marketable brand has been an essential part of his success, even if it does keep him busy.

“There’s security in being a brand; there’s certainty in being a brand,” Cee Lo said. “McDonald’s is a brand. And when you get your fix for a Big Mac, where do you go? There’s only one place you can go for a Big Mac, and that’s big McDonald’s. But my brand has a broader horizon, because my brand is, ‘Whatever you think you want, I just may be able to give it to you.’ ”

still don't know what I think of him. WIsh he would stick in the funk route for a little bit....I liekd his production on most recent Daddy's Gone from American Dad

Yeah, I saw him perform live too and I left not necessarily wanting my money back for his portion of the show, but kinda decided that i would pay to see him in concert alone, ever, despite the fact that I admire his voice.

errant said:

Based on the disaster I saw him put on stage at Lollapalooza this past summer, they should take all of his money away from him. And he was one I was looking most forward to.

He's that bad? Wow.

What I found interesting and appalling how an artist can sell 5M copies of a song (on iTunes) and still fall short of a net $1M. Something is very wrong indeed.

[Edited 12/27/11 11:56am]

Identity said:

What I found interesting and appalling how an artist can sale 5M copies of a song (on iTunes) and still fall short of a net $1M. Something is very wrong indeed.

Digital sales are not it's all cracked up to be. I think it's always been that way actually. You still need physical copies to get $1M. Going fully digital isn't gonna save the industry anyway.