The music industry according to super-producer Jimmy Iovine

“You almost cost us $3bn.” Jimmy Iovine is looking at me intently. Gesturing in my direction he turns to a colleague and says, deadpan: “I can’t believe I’m speaking to this guy. Ground zero is in the room right now.”

Is he joking? I can’t tell. We are sitting on a large, U-shaped sofa in his house in the pristine Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles, having just watched an episode of The Defiant Ones. This new HBO series documents the unlikely careers of Iovine, a music producer turned record-label boss turned digital mogul, and his friend and business partner, the hip-hop star Dr Dre.

We have reached the part where the two sell Beats, the headphones and music-streaming group they founded, to Apple for $3bn — a deal first revealed in May 2014 by a colleague and myself in the FT.

Negotiations between Beats and Apple had been going on in secret and the deal was not yet signed when our story broke — hence Iovine’s inference that we almost killed it. But a few weeks later, Apple officially confirmed it was buying Beats, making billionaires of its two founders. It remains Apple’s biggest ever acquisition, uniting the iPhone maker with a pair of music mavericks who, between them, have influenced the course of popular music for more than four decades. In June 2015, Iovine launched Apple Music, a streaming service that has since grown to 27 million paying users.

Plotting music’s digital future with the world’s largest technology company is a remarkable coda to a recording-industry career that spans Bruce Springsteen to Kendrick Lamar by way of Patti Smith, Tom Petty, U2 and Stevie Nicks.

And Iovine’s gated house, situated in the same neighbourhood as Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, is a far cry from his childhood home in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn. 

Back then, his father, a longshoreman, wanted the younger Iovine to follow him into a career on the docks. “My dad had a job for me and the big thing was that I would wear dress pants because it wasn’t a job where you’re down in the hull of a ship lifting crates. He said: ‘You’re going to be a checker down the pier. It’s a great job and you can wear nice clothes.’ I didn’t want to do that.” Music was calling instead. “I always wanted to be where the cool was because I didn’t think I was cool. But music was cool.” 

***

When I arrive at Iovine’s house in the late morning, he is finishing up a meeting with another East Coast transplant, the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, a friend and neighbour, who has come by for a chat. I spot a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting on the wall, alongside works by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Tracey Emin. 

After joining Iovine in the living room and saying hello to Combs (“You know you’ve made it when the FT comes to see you,” Iovine tells him, laughing), I ask why he got involved in The Defiant Ones. “I didn’t want to do it [initially] because I didn’t want to bring up old shit. There’s a lot of stuff there, you know what I mean?”

The series does not shy away from tough subjects: the death of Iovine’s father; the murder of Interscope artist Tupac Shakur; the divorce from his wife Vicki, after 24 years of marriage; the drama surrounding his former associate Marion “Suge” Knight, the gangsta-rap label boss who is currently awaiting trial for murder. “I did it because I realised there’s a lot of lessons in here. And I was doing it with Dre.” 

The series has plenty of previously unseen footage, including black-and-white video from the recording of Springsteen’s 1975 album Born to Run, featuring a skinny, bushy-haired Iovine engineering the album. He is considerably less hirsute these days but still skinny. Today he is dressed in his habitual uniform of jeans, sneakers and T-shirt. The kid from Brooklyn may have left the East Coast decades ago but he still speaks, somewhat hoarsely, with the accent of his youth. 

Iovine hated high school. When he left, he went to work in a Brooklyn clothing store called The Leading Male; he tells me that it sold the white suit worn by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He also played bass in a band. “The lousy guitar player in any band is the bass player.”

The group was called Phantasy — “We couldn’t spell” — and played Rolling Stones covers. It broke up when he was 17, but another member introduced him to Ellie Greenwich, one of the most prolific songwriters of the day — she co-wrote hits including “Be My Baby”, for The Ronettes, with Jeff Barry. “I used to go to her house every day and just sit on the floor and watch them write commercials.”

Greenwich was recording an album in the evenings. “I’m there one night, I walk in and everything is candlelit and there’s a recording engineer sitting behind the board and there’s Ellie Greenwich singing. Then when the session was over this really pretty girl came in with Elliot Scheiner — he was a great recording engineer and did all the Steely Dan albums. He had a great leather jacket and a leather bag. I said, ‘F**king leather, wow! That’s what I want to do!’ It blew my mind. I’d never seen a guy with a leather bag.”

I never allowed record companies into my session. Never. I told my guys: we’re betting on the act, let them make their music

By the time he was 20, Iovine had landed a job as an assistant at The Record Plant, a Manhattan studio where the Velvet Underground and Jimi Hendrix had recorded. “I was very insecure. I figured the only thing I can do is just work harder than everybody else and be useful. So I would anticipate when a client would need a cup of tea. I would anticipate when they wanted to rewind the tape. I would anticipate when they were going to do a vocal. You know what I mean? I’d be so on it and I was willing to do anything.”

His life could have taken a very different turn had he listened to his mother on Easter Sunday, 1974. That morning, his boss, the producer Roy Cicala, had called to say that he needed Jimmy to come to the studio to answer the phones. This enraged Iovine’s mother. He still lived at home and she had spent the morning cooking lunch. “My mother was a pain in my ass but she loved me.” She wanted him in his suit and with his family in church — like the neighbourhood’s other Italian-American families — and “went nuts” when he told her he was going to work. 

It was the right decision. Cicala was testing him to see if he was ready to “take a step up”, and there, sitting in the studio, was John Lennon, waiting to record his Rock ’n’ Roll solo album. Iovine would be helping to engineer it. Over the next five years he would work on three Lennon albums, as well as two for Springsteen and one for Patti Smith. 

“I didn’t have any sophistication. I didn’t really have any great taste or anything like that. I was just a kid from Brooklyn. But what I learnt is the why, the how. The work ethic.” 

***

Engineering records is an exhausting business and the hours took their toll. Springsteen was a perfectionist and Iovine once spent three weeks trying to help the star find the perfect drum sound. On Born to Run, he would often fall asleep at the soundboard. At one point, after working non-stop for eight days, he resorted to chewing aluminium foil to stay awake. The pain was excruciating, he says, but it helped him stay up “for two or three hours more, and I was able to get the mix. I was an animal.”

Working on Born to Run was particularly challenging: Jon Landau, Springsteen’s producer, had to talk him out of quitting. In The Defiant Ones, Landau explains what he said: “We are here to help Bruce make the best record he can. That’s the job. We are not here for you. We are not here for me.” It was a defining moment for Iovine. “I went back in there and I said to Bruce: ‘I’m here. Whatever you need. All I care about is that this album is as great as it can be.’” 

Born to Run turned Springsteen into a global star. It also enhanced Iovine’s reputation, and in the late 1970s he was asked to produce the album Easter for the Patti Smith Group. He realised that there wasn’t a hit single to draw listeners in — but Springsteen had a song, “Because the Night”, that he wasn’t using for his album Darkness on the Edge of Town. Iovine knew it would be perfect for Smith and convinced Springsteen to let her record it. “I thought: if a woman sings this lyric it can’t miss.” It became one of Smith’s biggest hits.

Iovine’s knack for spotting winners was evident again a couple of years later in 1981, when he produced Bella Donna, Stevie Nicks’ first solo album outside Fleetwood Mac. He was romantically involved with her at the time, a relationship he hid from friends — including Tom Petty, whose album he was close to finishing. Petty had flown him to Los Angeles to make the record and, whenever he went to Iovine’s house, Nicks would hide in the basement. Why? He was young, he says: “Anywhere outside the studio I was socially inept.”

As with Patti Smith, Iovine spotted that Nicks didn’t have an obvious hit to drive interest in her album. Petty had a song that he hadn’t used on an album — “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”. Iovine thought it would work better as a pop track, with Nicks and Petty duetting. He persuaded them to record it together and it rocketed up the charts.

Does he still love producing records? He shakes his head emphatically. Rattle and Hum, U2’s 1988 album, was the last straw. “They are an exhausting band. They are like four Bruces. It was just a time in my life where I couldn’t take another f***ing drum sound.” 

Taking his inspiration from David Geffen, who had run his own label and sold it in a deal that would make him billions of dollars, Iovine co-founded Interscope Records in 1989 with Ted Field, heir to the Marshall Field retail empire; in 1990, Warner Music’s Atlantic Group took a 50 per cent stake. 

“I felt like the young kids weren’t going to work with me as a producer. So if I started a record company I could work with other producers and work with younger artists because they’re on my label. I wouldn’t be producing them. I love equipment, I love record producing . . . I just don’t want to do it [myself].”

I know that in angst there’s sometimes the greatest music. I was getting the greatest music and I’d fight for it

Iovine also ensured that Interscope followed a creed he had lived by in the studio: its acts could express themselves however they wanted in the pursuit of their art. “I never allowed record companies into my session,” he says. “Never. You know why? Because if I’m in a room with you and I’m playing a song and I’ve got a very vulnerable artist here and you’re the record company, there’s no reaction that you could give that’s good. If you like it, that’s no good. If you don’t like it, that’s no good, and if you stay silent that’s worse. Nothing you can do is going to help.

“I told my guys [at Interscope]: we’re betting on the act, let them make their [music]. If Trent Reznor [of Nine Inch Nails] says ‘Get the f**k out of my way,’ you get the f**k out of his way. Dr Dre said: ‘If you send one of your guys up to my studio they’re not going to make it out. Not literally but you know what I’m saying.’”

Iovine met Dre for the first time in 1991. It was a “gigantic moment” in his life. “I didn’t know a lot about hip-hop but I sure as hell knew my speakers and what was coming out of those speakers was unprecedented. It was like hearing Phil Spector for the first time.” Dre introduced an epic scale and power to the sound. “He kept the edge but built it like it was a Pink Floyd record.” 

N.W.A, the gangsta rap group Dre founded with Ice Cube and Eazy-E, had broken up, and his label — Death Row — was looking for a partner to market and distribute his first solo album, The Chronic. But none of the other record companies would touch him: controversies stoked by N.W.A and its hits, such as “F**k tha Police”, had not died down. Iovine was undeterred. Dre, he says, made the album “on the run . . . they didn’t have any money, they didn’t have a record company. I said, this guy will define Interscope — period. And he did.”

Dre’s 1992 album and subsequent records from Snoop, Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson turned Interscope into a force in music, albeit a controversial one. The hip-hop scene was evolving and a new generation of acts was emerging. But while its stars had become millionaires, some did not want to shed their association with gang life.

Iovine won’t say much about Suge Knight — the former head of Death Row — perhaps for good reason. The hulking one-time NFL player literally loomed over 1990s hip hop, earning a reputation for violence and stoking tensions with rival acts from the East Coast. With Iovine’s tacit support, Dre walked out on Death Row in 1996 to get away from Knight and his entourage. 

Interscope acts were a political lightning rod. Campaigners took exception to the violent and sexist content in gangsta rap lyrics and began to pressure Time Warner, which owned 50 per cent of the company through its interest in Atlantic. Time Warner, in turn, wanted Iovine to offload Death Row: it didn’t have the stomach for gangsta rap. Iovine refused.

Time Warner then offered to buy the 50 per cent stake in Interscope that it didn’t own, with the aim of selling off Death Row. A corporate battle loomed but Iovine had no intention of selling, and countered with an offer to buy out Time Warner at $100m. A deal was struck and within a month Interscope had doubled its money, selling half the company to Edgar Bronfman Jnr’s Seagram for $200m in 1996.

Why didn’t he sell? “I had conviction about the music, and with Dre I had a genius on my hands,” he says — hip hop was worth defending. “I grew up with John Lennon and The Rolling Stones and I knew that in angst there’s sometimes the greatest music. I was getting the greatest music and I’d fight for it. I would have put up with anything.”

Like Iovine, Dre has shown an ability to reinvent himself, turning his hand to producing new talent after a couple of solo albums flopped. Iovine recalls an Interscope intern telling him in 1997 that he was going to watch a rap contest and asking if he wanted him to bring back a tape of an act. “You know how many kids came in with a tape? It happened every day.” But he remembered the encouragement he had been given early in his career. “So I told him to go and get me a tape.”

When the intern came back, Iovine gave the tape to Dre who was stunned by the rapping. It was a young white man from Michigan who called himself Eminem. Within weeks he had signed to Interscope and was working with Dre on his 1999 album The Slim Shady LP, which would stay in the Billboard charts for more than 100 weeks. 

Interscope’s acts were topping the charts but music was changing. In the first years of the new millennium it became clear that digital piracy enabled by sites such as Napster would destroy the industry. “When I went to Intel I knew it was dead as a duck,” says Iovine. He was there to meet an executive to discuss music. Iovine recalls: “He said: ‘One thing you have to realise, Jimmy, is that not every industry was made to last for ever.’”

Iovine worried about the industry’s prospects but was reinvigorated when he first met Steve Jobs in 2003 and saw what the latter was doing with technology. “It was all-encompassing [and] cooler than anything.” He formed a close relationship with Jobs, his successor Tim Cook, and Eddy Cue, who runs Apple’s software and services business, and first discussed launching a music-streaming service with them in 2006. “But they were busy launching the iPhone.” 

Then, with the music industry crumbling around his ears, Iovine found an alternative outlet for his energy, after a chance conversation at Dre’s Malibu house. The rapper’s lawyer had just called him to pitch a fashion-endorsement deal but Iovine said he was focusing on the wrong area. “I said: not sneakers. Speakers.” Dre was on board immediately and came up with the Beats name. 

The headphones quickly became ubiquitous. Interscope acts, such as Lady Gaga, sported them in music videos; Premier League footballers and NBA stars such as LeBron James wore them on their way to compete. When The Black Eyed Peas played the 2011 Super Bowl halftime show in front of an audience of more than 100 million, the stage was shaped in a “B” that resembled the Beats logo. According to data from NPD Group, more than 60 million Beats headphone and speaker units have been sold globally since 2008.

“I’d say to our designer: make the B on the headphones bigger,” Iovine recalls. “And he’d say, ‘I don’t know . . . it’s too big.’ We are competing with headphones but we’re also competing with Nike. And we have an advantage. If somebody’s walking down the street with a headphone, you can see them. If somebody’s walking down the street with a sneaker, the cars block it. So I want to be able to read that B from across the street.”

Beats’ edgy cool clearly appealed to Apple as part of the 2014 deal, and it also wanted the brand to reinvent Apple’s digital music offering. But the main driver was securing the services of Dre and Iovine, the hip-hop legend and the musical Zelig with a knack for finding hits and the producers to make them. 

Iovine remains concerned that there is too much free music available — and YouTube, he says, is the biggest challenge. The site is “a massive problem for the record industry . . . it represents something like 50 per cent of all music consumption but only four or five per cent of the revenue. How does that work?”

He is concerned too about changes to the industry’s business model — the fact that big acts can now make much more from international touring than from recorded music sales. “There are so many places to play now. Play Dubai and you might make half a million dollars — ‘Oh, that’s more money than I’m going to make on my entire f***ing album.’” If acts are touring all the time and playing their hits, the quality of new music will inevitably suffer. “Not everybody does that. Kendrick Lamar, Ed Sheeran, Adele . . . they stopped touring and made their record.” 

I always wanted to be where the cool was because I didn’t think I was cool. But music was cool

How long will Iovine stay with Apple? His life has changed in many ways since the deal was struck. He admits to struggling emotionally for a period after his marriage broke down and he sought counsel from a rabbi. But these days he is much happier: last year he married the model Liberty Ross at a starry ceremony attended by friends including Oprah Winfrey and Paul McCartney. 

Talking to Iovine about his career and the energy that propelled his shifts from engineer to producer, label boss to digital boss, I wonder if he will eventually chafe at life in a big company, with all the attendant layers of bureaucracy. 

“You know, I’m 64, man,” he says, in that raspy Brooklyn voice. “I’ll slow up on working someday. But I’m going to do my job with Eddy and Apple, [and] I’m going to give them everything I’ve got, you know what I mean? I think they’re satisfied now but I’m going to make sure they’re really satisfied by this deal. That’s how I work.” 

Matthew Garrahan is the FT’s global media editor. HBO’s ‘The Defiant Ones’ premieres in the US on July 9

Portraits by Molly Matalon

Photographs: Getty Images