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David Foster • Born Nov. 1, 1949 in Victoria • Record producer • Senior vice-president of Warner Music Group
I was five when my dad discovered I had perfect pitch. It’s a form of innate musical memory. When you hear an E, you know it’s an E — like when you see the colour blue, you know it’s blue. Now I’ve lost it a little bit because of age. It atrophies like everything else. That’s the only bad thing about getting old: your body falling apart. Everything else about getting old is fantastic.
By the time I was 13 — just a skinny, pimply kid — I was making more money than my father. Well, there were weeks when I did. One night I played with my band on New Year’s Eve, I made more money than he made in a week. But he never made more than 90 bucks a week. He was a maintenance yard superintendent.
I wasn’t a good enough classical pianist. If I had been just a little bit better, I would have been great. But then I would have been ranked 130th in the world, and you wouldn’t be sitting here with me, because I’d be sitting in a rundown apartment somewhere waiting for the phone to ring for some B symphony to hire me.
I love middle-of-the-road music. Not because it’s lucrative, but because when I lay my hands on the piano, it’s the only thing that comes out. I wanted to be a jazz musician, I wanted to be a classical musician, but when I found this pop thing, it was very natural to me and also very lucrative. I know a lot of people think it’s elevator music, but I don’t make any excuses. It doesn’t pay to be a music snob.
I know I’m good. You can’t have 15 Grammys and have sold half-a-billion records and not be good. My ego’s very healthy and in place. But I am self-deprecating, like any good Canadian. I have good moral values, I don’t do drugs, I worked really hard and did all the right things.
Guerrilla stardom doesn’t work. A lot of young artists think they can break on YouTube or MySpace, but you can’t do it without someone spending millions of dollars on you. Even the old artists think, “I’m making my deal with Wal-Mart, I don’t need anything.” But they forget that somebody spent millions of dollars making them a star in the first place. It’s called marketing.
Eventually, we will own a piece of our artists like Colonel Parker and Elvis. It will be a real partnership, the way a restaurant, or any business, is. You put up the money, you get half. You sneeze and I’ll take 50% of the sneeze. But you’re going to get 50% too, instead of 18%. Then if you do a Pepsi commercial, I’m gonna get 50% of that, too.
Moving into the boardroom sort of happened by accident, but I like it. I’ve learned a lot. I never knew how the rest of the business worked. I just knew that I made music, I put it out there and either it became a hit or it didn’t.
The AOL-Time Warner merger was one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. It will be written about for hundreds of years. Even I, with an 11th-grade education, knew it was a tragedy. But, apparently, our chairman Jerry Levin did not. He’s a good manager, but he got snowed.
It was a thrill to meet AOL founder Steve Case. I admired the way he had built a company that was valued at billions and billions of dollars, but had nothing but promise. And he did say that our business, the record business, was dying. He was right, because now everybody under the age of 20 thinks it’s their God-given right to hear music for free. Fortunately, people are still buying the music I make.
I like being Charity Boy. It makes me feel good. I have no shame about raising money for worthy causes through my foundation.
Leave your ego at the door. That’s the most important business lesson. One of my artists, Josh Groban, just told me he wants to have somebody else — Rick Rubin — produce his fifth album. Rick’s a rock legend. But I was stuck in my little stupid egotistical world of “No! Nobody else can produce you. I have to produce you!” Then I realized Josh is still with Warner Bros., I’m still an executive with Warner and he’s still on my label at Warner. The only thing in the way of him being successful with his next record is my ego.
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