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Could a pair of headphones save the music business?

11.06.10

Complaining about what junior people today are listening to is not exactly original but you don’t watch it from the record executive behind Lady Gaga. Jimmy Iovine, his baseball cap different in the stiff dining room at Manhattan’s St Regis motor hotel, is getting worked up not about noise or explicit lyrics but about the je sais quoi of sound coming through the iPod generation’s headphones.

The wiry 57-year-old creator began his career as a sound engineer, working with John Lennon on Overwhelm ’n’ Roll and Bruce Springsteen on Born to Run , and is now chairman of Interscope-Geffen-A&M Records, retirement community to Lady Gaga, Eminem and the Black Eyed Peas and one of the largest labels in the happy’s largest record company.

“The people we work with devote hundreds of millions of dollars every year getting the undamaged exactly right.” But then, says Iovine, his emotions rising, much of what has been so carefully captured in the studio recording proceeding has to be

Source: Financial Times