recording executive
Personal Information
Born c. 1949, in Los Angeles, CA; children: three.
Education: Attended Long Beach State College.
Died: November 4, 2008.
Career
Record company executive. Inventory clerk, purchasing agent (in production supplies), and new-toy coordinator for Mattel Toys; regional promotional representative and head of West Coast promotion and marketing for Stax Records; independent album promoter; performed promotional work for Casablanca, Atlantic Records, CBS Records, and A&M Records, 1980-83; began as vice-president, became president of black music department for MCA Records, 1984-88; president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Motown Records, 1988--; developed, with New York City's Apollo Theatre, the label Apollo Theatre Records, 1989.
Life's Work
"Times have changed," Jheryl Busby, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Motown Records, announced to Pamela Shariff in Black Enterprise, "and Motown can't be what it was in the 1960s. Today, I want to position this company as a beacon to black executives and to black talent." Although Busby acknowledged in the New York Times that Motown's past was stellar when Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, and Diana Ross and the Supremes were contributing classic songs to the Top 40 regularly, he had a different vision for "the second chapter of Motown." When Busby took office, he did not foresee legal battles with his promotional distributor, MCA Records, that in the early 1990s were threatening to destroy his visionary aims. With optimism, he disclosed to Jeffrey Ressner in Entertainment Weekly, "If you're a Christian like me, you realize there is a God. And the last time I checked, He was on Motown's side."
Born in Los Angeles, California, Busby attended Long Beach State College. He began his career as an inventory clerk at Mattel Toys, working his way up to new-toy coordinator. Later Busby joined Stax Records, where he advanced to head of West Coast promotion and marketing. During the early 1980s, he worked as a promoter for several recording companies, including Casablanca, CBS, A&M, and Atlantic. Employed by MCA Records as vice-president of the black music division in 1984, Busby enjoyed phenomenal success. His promotion of such established singers as Patti LaBelle and up-and-coming acts like New Edition catapulted record sales to $50 million in the mid-1980s. His division was number one in black album sales when, holding the title of president of the black music division, he ended his career at MCA Records in the late 1980s.
Offered the opportunity to head Motown in 1988, Busby told Michael Lev in the New York Times, "I thought it couldn't get any better: president and CEO of probably the most important record label in America in terms of black music." Revitalizing Motown, he would find, involved a mass of legal red tape and required learning "a more aggressive marketing-oriented approach to developing new talent," as quoted by Shariff.
In late September of 1989, Busby united Los Angeles-based Motown with its counterpart on the East Coast, New York City's Apollo Theatre. Together they formed Apollo Theatre Records, a new label that Motown promoted and distributed. Filmmaker Spike Lee as well as recording artists and producers Kool Mo Dee, Heavy D, and Teddy Riley, among others, were invited by Apollo Theatre Records to form an advisory committee. Performers who appeared on Amateur Night at the Apollo and at area clubs were selected by Motown and the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation, which owns the Apollo Theatre, to record with the new label. When Busby announced the Apollo venture at a press conference, Black Enterprise quoted him as saying, "Motown's objective is to make these talented young adults into full fledged performing artists."
Forming a training program for those who wished to become record executives was another part of Busby's undertakings at Motown as the decade of the 1980s closed. He also negotiated with rhythm and blues superstar Diana Ross to come back to the Motown label, for which she once made some of her greatest hits, including "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." "It's like the queen returning home," Busby related to Richard W. Stevenson in the New York Times.
In 1990 Motown outscored all other record labels in the rhythm and blues category, producing five Number One hits. Busby's leadership took Motown from tenth to fourth place on the black album charts with such LPs as Stevie Wonder's soundtrack from the motion picture Jungle Fever. In addition, after launching the careers of Another Bad Creation, Johnny Gill, and Boyz II Men, Busby registered platinum records with multi-million dollar sales.
In his effort to make Motown more profitable, Busby entered into a dispute with his distributor and part owner, MCA Records, a unit of Matsushita Electric Company of Japan. According to the original agreement, MCA was to manufacture, market, and promote Motown records at a relatively high fee, but by 1991 Busby was disillusioned the distributor. Black Enterprise reported that he charged the company with "ineptitude and deliberate misconduct" and "egregious distribution failures" in a lawsuit seeking to terminate Motown's contract with MCA. MCA countersued, relating in the New York Times that Motown was "unprofitable and many in the industry think of it as uninspired.'
Busby's next move was to change Motown's distributor to PolyGram while still under contract with MCA, because, he argued in Entertainment Weekly, MCA treated Motown "like a third world company." Embroiled in legal problems and defection of personnel, including Smokey Robinson and possibly Lionel Richie and Stevie Wonder, Jheryl Busby faced litigation in the early 1990s that could possibly unsettle Motown's atmosphere indefinitely. With plans to merchandise the Motown label to generate income throughout the 1990s, Busby summed up his regrets about Motown's difficulties with MCA when he told Lev, "I never thought I wouldn't be able to sit down with people I spent five years with and talk about where we go in the future."
Further Reading
Sources
- Black Enterprise, November 1989; December 1991.
- Entertainment Weekly, October 25, 1991.
- New York Times, February 19, 1989; May 19, 1991.
— Marjorie Burgess
