Billboard DMS 2003 - Hail to the Chief

The Hail to the Chief panel featured the presidents of several dance record labels talking candidly about the changing marketplace. When asked about the biggest surprise of the past year, Daniel Glass (Artemis) responded about the press dwelling so much on the RIAA issues recently and that "dance music is ready to explode because we are all so uptight." Jurgen Korduletsch (Radikal) continued, saying the biggest problem "is not downloading but that people are indifferent to the music." Patrick Moxey (Ultra) mentioned that there hasn't been much action taken against physical piracy and bootlegging. Tom Silverman (Tommy Boy) was surprised that hip-hop is still growing and that even KTU is adding hip-hop. He said that he was saddened about the divide between hip-hop and dance. Cory Robbins (Robbins) continued, saying that except for "Reina and the Roc Project, nothing has crossed over like last year."

Jurgen agreed saying that to appeal to larger audience, records must be infectious to everyone. He looked back to the time before the early 90s, when there was more variety of music and that now "DJs have no surprises in their sets." Tom continued about dance music being at a disadvantage because DJ's dont play the big records and the issues with radio. He discussed how Clear Channel controls radio station with passive research and effectively kills anything that is new or unique. Cory added that good research helps a record and bad research kills a record. Patrick wished that radio programmers "had the balls to play good music." Cory concluded that there have been good dance records this year but not unbelievable and that the danceable records were better than the dance records.

Itunes was mentioned as the only positive thing this year in the industry and now it takes Madison Avenue to be a big part of the plan to break a record. The big hit of the holiday season was predicted to be Michael McDonald's "Motown" album because of the Verizon commercial.

An interesting question was posed whether the dance diva still relevant, posed by Michael Paoletta "if a diva hits a note and no one hears it, like a tree falling in the woods - do you hear it?" Tom responded about the new Kristine W album saying that while most dance music is not lyrically challenging, Kristine W has a mission and something to say about her fight against cancer. His label is planning to help break Kristine out of dance ghetto. Tom also was in stark opposition to the new Universal Records plan to drop the price on CDs to $9.99 saying that it would be the end of all independent labels because full-length CD prices would keep going down just like singles did from 1.99 to .99 to .49.

At the end, everyone was asked what song they would bring to a Desert Island (DID) to listen to continuously and which record was their Magic Moment (MM) which made them love dance music. Here are their responses:

Daniel - Beatles (DID), Native New Yorker (MM)
Jurgen - Coldplay "In My Room" (DID)
Cory - Marvin Gaye "Lets Get it On" (DID), Patrick Hernandez "Born to Be Alive" (MM)
Patrick - David Bowie "Heroes" (DID), -Benny Benassi "Satisfaction" (MM)
Tom - Dr Buzzard or Aretha Franklin "Respect" (DID) , and more recent Kylie Minogue "Love at First Sight" - the Scumfrog mix (MM)