Former Bon Jovi manager Doc McGhee doesn’t think the band would succeed if they were starting out in today’s music business.
Speaking during a Q&A session at this weekend’s Kiss Kruise: Land-Locked in Las Vegas event, Kiss‘ current manager predicted that we’re going to miss out on future generations of great music because corporate greed has killed the industry’s ecosystem.
“I think Motley Crue would have happened because of how infectious that was, and how kids connected,” he began, reference another one of his former clients. “I don’t believe Bon Jovi would have made it, because it took too long for us to get to [the band’s 1986 commercial breakthrough and third album] Slippery When Wet.”
“Now today, we don’t have three album deals,” he continued. “We have one single deal. We have 187,000 songs that go to Spotify every day. That’s crazy. And they think that in the next year or two there will be over 300,000 songs (per day).”
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McGhee went on to lament that “technology and a lot of greed” has been allowed into the music business in the last decade in a half. “We used to have an ecosystem that allowed everybody to live, like a reef,” he explained. “The managers could only do so much and eat so many of the fish, and the publishers could only eat so many of the fish… but we kept the reef alive. And now the corporate world has come in here and killed the reef.
“So the new kids that come in will say I can’t make money touring, it’s too expensive. I can’t get on Spotify I can’t get on anything, because there’s too much clutter, too much information out there. So what we’re going to do is lose the next Bob Dylan, the next Motley Crues, the next AC/DCs, the next Led Zeppelins, because they’re going to say ‘I can’t make money doing this, so I gotta go work for my Dad.'”
He does see one potential star on the horizon: “The one I’m hoping for, I don’t know him, I have nothing to do with him, is Yungblud. I think he has that connection piece to people.”
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Gallery Credit: Anthony Kuzminski
