Josh Groban to Work With Metallica Producer
FOX News
January 22, 2009
By Roger Friedman
Here's news from the music biz that's weird and interesting but also potentially troubling for two record companies.
Josh Groban, the young velvet-voiced singer who bridges opera and popular music, is getting ready to make a new album with Metallica producer Rick Rubin.
Yes, it's a cool idea, but here's the wrinkle: Groban records for Warner M. Group and producer David Foster. Rubin is the highly paid chief in orbit of Sony Music. Not only should the twain not meet, as they say, but critics of Rubin and struggling Sony might wonder what in the heck he's doing with a Warner artist and why he isn't doing a Sony project.
Of course, Metallica isn't Rubin's only credit. Recently he produced a dud (sales wise) album for Sony/Columbia's Neil Diamond. That was nice, but it produced no revenue. Rubin has already cost Sony a bundle and has yet to generate cash. To make matters worse, he made the music company move its west coast HQ to really expensive digs in Beverly Hills from just fine space in Santa Monica. The rub, of course, is that Rubin doesn't come into the office anyway. Where did this Rick Rubin mania start? Was it just because he once had Johnny Cash sing a Nine Inch Nails song? I just don't get it.
But I digress: While Sir Howard Stringer and his Japanese bosses figure out why Rubin would be helping the competition, the competitor is having its own problems. On Tuesday, Warner stock dropped to an all time low of $1.89. Yesterday it closed at $2.30. Maybe Wall Street realized that the company sold only 39,000 copies of the soundtrack of "Notorious" on its Bad Boy label. WMG paid $30 million for Sean P Diddy Combs's Bad Boy a couple of years ago, a deal that turned out to be more of a dry cleaning than anything Combs has ever needed for his wardrobe.
Bad Boy was really founded on Combs's early on ownership of tracks by his old pal, the obese murdered rapper Christopher Wallace aka Notorious BIG, or Biggie Smalls. Astutely, Combs milked and reissued the Biggie catalog since his death, but interest may finally have evaporated. If 39,000 is what they sold in the first week of release, that means Bad Boy is in Big Trouble and WMG must be getting sleepy from eating all that turkey.
It's ironic, too, because "Notorious" had the biggest opening weekend ever for a Fox Searchlight film last weekend. The well reviewed film took in almost $24 million. Critics are raving, too,
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