The Knock-Offs, Chapter One

When her boss told her about the strategy meeting, Chandra West tried to wriggle out of it with all the usual excuses. She was just a peon in OmniGlobe Entertainment’s artists and repertoire department. She’d only been working there for two months, and could barely find the cafeteria. She was not boardroom material. She even tossed in a quote from Thoreau about distrusting any enterprise that required new clothes.

Her boss said someone from A&R had to be there to take notes, even if all the new VP did was stupefy everyone with charts, graphs and corporate-speak. What he didn’t say was how he and the head of A&R both arranged to have schedule conflicts for a 7 a.m. meeting. Chandra didn’t want to tell him, but she actually wanted to go. She was only 27, and she was going to her first strategy meeting. How could she not be excited?

Wearing an outfit fresh from the soulless racks of a department store, Chandra arrived sadistically early next morning at the OmniGlobe boardroom. A crowd of high-level managers was already there pillaging the breakfast buffet with metal tongs. She hovered, waiting, until there was a gap in the blouses and jackets, then shouldered up to the table, emerging with a thimble-sized cup of coffee. She found a seat next to some veteran corporate warrior checking email on his PDA. He was one of those important-looking types she had seen in airports, with a laptop, an ear dildo, and habit of washing down his beta blockers with rum and Diet Coke.

She had never been on the thirtieth floor before, and was impressed with the view of the Los Angeles basin, an expanse of freeways and high-rises fading into the haze. Somewhere east of the haze the sun was rising, and the early morning sky was gray at street level, rising in sediment-tinted streaks of violet, pink, coral, orange and beige.

When automatic blinds started sliding across the windows, people scrambled to sit and get ready, like a grown-up version of musical chairs. For a moment everyone was plunged into darkness, until a single recessed light illuminated the woman at the head of the table. She had straight brown hair, large brown eyes, a slightly furrowed forehead, and a soft jaw line that would probably change to jowls as she aged. Her narrow nose turned up slightly to reveal narrow nostrils.

The woman stood and introduced herself as Veronica Hogel, OmniGlobe Entertainment’s vice president for strategic planning. She didn’t make any introductory remarks, or thank people for flying across the country on short notice. Instead she waited until the screen said “Music Industry Outlook,” then began recapping what many people already knew: the news was not good. A chart of plummeting CD sales; a chart showing the accompanying rise in music downloads. A chart of OmniGlobe’s decline in revenue. Musicians were making next to nothing selling music, and some were even giving away their music as a freebie to fans who bought concert tickets.

Music biz still sux, Chandra jotted on her little notepad.

“It’s getting harder and harder to make money,” Veronica announced. “Despite these challenges, OmniGlobe is uniquely positioned to capitalize on its strengths as a media company. But we have to hit the right market segments.”

A new slide appeared, with the statistic that almost half of all recorded music is purchased by people over forty. Below that, another statistic: ninety percent of the 40-plus crowd are parents. Veronica turned and acknowledged the next screen, which had a large color photo of four men in black pants and long-sleeve shirts colored red, yellow, blue and purple. They were standing in a line, turned left and pointing at the camera with their right hands, and they were smiling ludicrously, like poster boys for Prozac.

“The Wiggles?” a woman asked from the semi-darkness.

Chandra worked with rock groups, but she knew who they were. Her sister’s crapatorium of a minivan was filled with Wiggles CDs and DVDs, and her little niece did this weird speaking-in-tongues thing whenever she heard “Toot Toot Chugga Chugga Big Red Car.” While Veronica put everyone to sleep describing the Wiggles’ rise to fame, Chandra zoned out and doodled, pausing to look longingly at the silver coffee urn.

“Last year, in CDs, DVDs, TV shows, licensing, merchandise and touring, they grossed $45 million.”

Chandra looked up, because $45 million was a lot of money. Sure enough, Veronica had a slide ranking musical acts, and the Wiggles were tied for third. In the whole world. With the Eagles.

“Children’s music is easy,” Veronica continued. “The music is simple, the choreography is simple, and the tour is less expensive, so its return on investment is higher. When The Eagles are touring, they might play twelve times a month. The Wiggles do twenty-five shows a month—that’s 200 shows a year.”

Wiggles = cash machine, Chandra wrote.

The next slide showed a montage of fuzzy, friendly people and stuffed animals. “Raffi, Barney, and The Wiggles all hit it big thanks to TV exposure. With our recent acquisition of the Family Values Channel, we have that. When we form a band they won’t have to spend years playing school gyms to build a fan base, because we’ll use TV to generate a worldwide following in just a few weeks.”

Veronica paused while the lights came on and the screen rolled up. Everyone at the table was blinking, but it wasn’t from the change in lighting.

“We’ll have six profitable revenue streams: CDs, DVDs, TV, merchandise, licensing, and touring. Once the brand is successful we’ll internationalize it, and localize it for markets in South America and Asia. The Wiggles make a lot of easy money. My plan is to create a group that’s bigger than them, and put that money in our pockets.”

VP forming Wiggles knockoff band.

Veronica wanted to take the Hannah Montana/Jonas Brothers model and apply it to the diaper demographic. It was a good idea, in a twisted, corporate sort of way. But it was also a shock. The people in the room, Chandra included, were used to working with adult musical acts, not bands that danced with stuffed dinosaurs and sang punchy ninety-second songs about fruit salad.

Chandra had a question and raised her hand, feeling like a doe-eyed sophomore in an art history lecture. Veronica made eye contact and nodded slightly.

“What about Uncle Chester?” Chandra asked. “Are we going to promote him?”

Chandra grew up on Uncle Chester. She’d worn out her Uncle Chester cassettes and videos as a child, and she still knew the words of every song on “Uncle Chester’s Happy Happy Neighborhood.” Even in the midst of her clubbing days, when she and her friends were trying so hard to be über-hip, she kept all his CDs hidden in a shoebox. Uncle Chester was so good with audiences, Chandra had even shown video of him to a young post-punk band who had all the stage presence of four guys picking lint out of their navels. When she started at OmniGlobe, one of the first things she did was find a way to meet him and get an autographed picture.

“We’re phasing him out,” Veronica said. “We can’t dilute our energies with competing brands in the same space.”

She’s getting rid of Uncle Chester? She’s firing him? Chandra felt like she’d been kicked in the chest.

“But Uncle Chester is popular,” someone else said. “People like him.”

“Uncle Chester just turned 47. One of the Wiggles is in his mid-fifties. Children don’t want singers who are balding or use Grecian Formula. They want youthful, good-looking and energetic. This is a prime market opportunity for a younger band.”

Chandra picked up her pen. VP is cold-hearted bitch.

Someone else asked, “Who are we going to promote? Do we have someone as good?”

“We’re going to create the act,” Veronica explained. “And we’re going to leverage our synergy to make it the most lucrative band in the world.”

“Children’s band,” prompted a man at the end of the table.

“Band. Period.” Veronica fixed him with a withering gaze. “Children’s entertainment is the last great opportunity. There’s a huge market for it, but the market isn’t even segmented. You reach everyone, because their taste is immature.”

Veronica flipped through her PowerPoint slides. “What no one has fully exploited is that you don’t need talent to turn a profit, because it’s all about promotion and mindshare. You don’t even have to keep the act fresh. Kids will outgrow the demographic, but live births are renewing the market every day. Actually, they’re expanding it.”

You don’t need talent to turn a profit. Chandra’s job in A&R was discovering and developing talent, finding that one rough-cut gem and turning it into a crown jewel. But the VP’s plan had nothing to do with nurturing artists so they could create good music. It was an effort to exploit little kids through promotion and mindshare.

Veronica paced back and forth while she evangelized about how parents would buy CDs for a higher margin, and how much they’d spend on concerts and merchandise. “Most important, we’ll own the brand and the rights to all their songs. And once we evolve this as a core competency, we’ll extend it into other divisions of the company. This is synergy, disparate business units sharing and cooperating to create something greater than the sum of its parts. And this is all just the first part of OmniGlobe’s new blockbuster business model: go huge and dominate.”

“The first step is to find bands,” Veronica added. “Get the stringers out looking today. We need entertainers who are young, in their twenties to early thirties, and clean cut. No tattoos, piercings or facial hair. That will be in their contract. They need to be presentable and good with kids, if we can swing it. Christians or Mormons would be a plus.”

Chandra’s pen hovered over her notes as she tried to imagine the memo from A&R, telling its stringers to start trolling libraries, school gyms, and Shriners’ parades.

“We’re going to do a reality show,” Veronica said, turning to the man sitting next to her. “Like ‘American Idol’ for the zero-to-six age demographic.”

“Idol?” The man gulped. “For a kids’ band?”

“The viewers will do our marketing research for us, paying for the privilege of crowning the most consumer-friendly band. We’ll test-market kids’ songs from our catalog, we’ll make royalties off those songs, we’ll make money when kids text-message their votes. We’ll make behind-the-scenes DVDs with rehearsals, interviews, and outtakes, and a greatest hits CD when the band start touring. And since we’re developing the band internally, we’ll own them, so we can pay them a flat salary. The cost structure is extremely advantageous.”

After Veronica’s fervid description of revenue streams and owning people, Chandra half-expected her to burst out in an evil-genius laugh. Band paid peanuts. Label makes millions, Chandra wrote.

“The next step is promotion. Once the band is working on the first CD and DVD, we’ll do viral marketing, talking up the band on the social networking websites, writing letters to parenting magazines asking to profile the band, and seeding the tabloids with rumors. We’ll work a deal with ChunkyBurger to put ballots and figurines in their Chunky Monkey Kiddie Meals.” She waved her hand vaguely. “And some of that charity do-gooder stuff for good PR.”

An admin appeared and gave everyone handouts with NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT printed on the top sheet. Chandra flipped through the contract. If “synergy” meant sharing and cooperation, why was she making them sign an NDA?

Instead, she stole a glance at Veronica, sitting robotically at the head of the table. In one short meeting she had terrified most of the upper management, fired Uncle Chester, and changed the company’s entire direction. She was brilliant, visionary, greedy, ruthless and paranoid. She was the new face of OmniGlobe.