Pyramid

Transcript status: Machine-assisted reading transcript prepared from the original recording. Obvious proper names have been corrected; executive review remains pending. Oral history is presented separately from filed documentary fact.

00:00 Pyramid Records. It should have worked. It could have worked. It didn't work—but it was a long way to get from that beginning to the end. So, something I thought would be super fun, right up in my wheelhouse: music, record companies, artists, things like that. As dysfunctional as the music industry is, so was this deal. The idea was to take Pyramid Records, or Pyramid Media, public—to raise capital, to sign more artists, to have more rights to put out their albums.

00:43 The head of the list was a gentleman and a legend named Alan Jacobi. Great guy, super knowledgeable. He was an attorney—a music attorney for lots of other big rap stars and rock stars, like Joe Walsh. Great guy to work with. He didn't know much about the public markets. A friend of his brought us in because we knew about public markets and said, “Listen, I need to raise some money. We need to sign these artists.” We thought we had a chance to go after some of the old classics like Con Funk Shun and En Vogue. They all had material floating around that needed to be locked down by somebody.

01:24 Even Al Green came on the scene and offered his entire catalog for a hundred thousand dollars a year, which meant you could have the rights to do what you wanted with it. That blew me away because my mother, growing up, listened to Al Green. Fabulous stuff. I'm thinking, “How can this not work?” We started looking at whether we put it in one of our SPACs or a trading shell already, or whether we do something from the beginning. We started the filing process.

02:02 Alan was a little impatient. He said we needed to get some artists signed right away. We found some money and asked what kinds of deals were out there. We talked about En Vogue. They wanted something like fifty thousand dollars. I did some research and said, “It's not 1975 anymore. Let's try to secure them with ten grand and get some traction.” We signed an agreement with them, and we signed an agreement with Con Funk Shun. Then we kept working on our filings, some of which are on this page, and working through return comments from the SEC.

02:54 As we were plodding along, the industry changed even more. Even the 360 deal—which was becoming the norm—meant the record company or media company representing a band got a piece of everything: touring, posters, T-shirts, recordings, streaming. A lot of bands started to figure out that they didn't really need a record company to do all this. If they had no knowledge of the business, they needed a manager and a record company to help organize that end. But smart artists realized they could do more themselves. The same thing happened with booking agents: why give away five or ten percent when you can book and market on the internet and look up what you don't know?

03:42 When you get really big—Madonna size—you need a company around you. But most bands, even some of the older ones, were fine on their own. As we went down the pathway, we realized it was going to take three to six months to do what we wanted and get the company public. We took the long way around and did it fresh through a process we probably wouldn't use today. During that period, bands fizzled out and others wanted more money. After maybe more than a year, the project fell by the wayside.

04:24 Pyramid Records continued to exist with Alan and Josh Danoff, who handled the administrative work. But the exciting idea of Pyramid Records taking off came to an end. Like many record companies now, what remains is often distribution and help with the business around artists—not fifty-thousand-dollar advances and tour support. I got a chance to be part of an old-school record company for a little while. Joe Walsh was one of the last signings, and Jon Secada, I think, was one of the last records they got done before Alan decided to shut it down and focus on being an attorney for the music industry.

05:14 So there is Pyramid Records: what could have been, what I wanted it to be. You never know. This could be another chapter. Stay tuned.