Clive Davis and the music biz

Last summer I tracked down a copy of Clive, the out-of-print 1975 book by veteran music-business mogul Clive Davis, on Amazon for something like $35. (I see three copies now for as low as $9.91, so the joke's on me.) He wrote it shortly after then-extremely-powerful Columbia Records dumped him as boss of the label, so there's some bitterness in his retelling. It's hardly a journalism book -- you won't get any perspective other than Clive's -- but some of the stories are great. I especially liked the (kind of sad) scene of Janis Joplin's manager, Albert Grossman, telling Davis she was interested in having sex with him "to cement the deal." "I ... sort of ... deferred ... the offer," wrote Davis, a family man who'd risen through the music-business ranks after starting out as a clean-cut lawyer.

I thought of all this after hearing the surprising news that Davis was leaving his powerful CEO post at the major record label BMG and shifting to a new position: "chief creative officer." I'm not sure what to make of this. Some people say it's a cost-cutting move by BMG's parent, Sony BMG, given 76-year-old Davis' big salary and "spend money to make money" habits; others say it was Davis' decision, to avoid budgets and bureaucracy so he can focus on working with artists from Rod Stewart to Alicia Keys. Either way, it should shake up the record business.

Strangely, after all the revolutionary events that have transformed (and, some would say, killed) the music business, it's still run by the same people who ran it for decades. Davis. Doug Morris of Universal Music, who is 68 and ran Atlantic Records in the 1980s. Edgar Bronfman Jr. of Warner Music, who bought PolyGram and turned it into Universal in the mid-1990s. The only real new blood at the very top is Guy Hands, the CEO of Terra Firma, who took over EMI last year and has been working on cost-cutting and, likely coming soon, layoffs.

Does the Davis move represent a changing of the guard? We'll see.