Tommy Boy Can CD Future

A record company that's not a record company? Goods and services as information? For Tommy Boy, it assumes the proportions of a Zen koan. How do you lead the market and follow customer tastes? How do you avoid imposing your vision without endlessly recycling proven hits? This is the record-industry version of a dilemma faced by companies of all kinds as shorter product cycles, the proliferation of product models, and customer-driven strategies draw more industries closer in spirit to the worlds of fashion and entertainment: How do you innovate and give people what they want?

"There has to be a fundamental respect and enthusiasm for hip hop at Tommy Boy, tempered with realism about the marketplace," says Monica Lynch. "It's about balance. And the rules change all the time; the styles change all the time. Rap is so diverse. There are so many subgenres in hip hop right now that have very little to do with one another except that they're all hip hop records in some way shape or form. But the aesthetic values and audiences for those records are very different."

"I love it," exults Silverman. "There is an election every week and the results come in every Wednesday in Sound Scan. The record business should be run by the people who buy the records."

This interplay of aesthetics and business lies at the core of the Tommy Boy vision. And in this core lie the seeds of a lifestyle company. The Sound Scan and BDS numbers are not merely sales and airplay figures that help Tommy Boy allocate resources; they are reports from the front lines of youth culture, real information about changing attitudes, tastes, and styles.

And styles, no matter how short-lived, are not merely ruffles and flourishes. They are a matter of the most urgent meaning for the people who adopt them. Whether it is white boys in Des Moines buying gangsta rap as a badge of mild rebellion against their suburban life or black kids formulating a usable personal philosophy out of shards of Malcolm X and samples of James Brown, Tommy Boy's customers construct their highly volatile identities out of signs and symbols from the culture.

Of course, people have always used products to create and clarify their identities. But today we live in the age of identity. Never before, the world over, has the search for identity been the driver of so many events - from bloody assertions of ethnic independence in Central Europe to school-board debates over multiculturalism. The politics of identity - ethnicity, race, gender, sexual preference - has everywhere replaced the politics of consensus.

Thus, to operate as a lifestyle company in the Tommy Boy sense is to tie the organization to the most potent force operating in the world today. Tommy Boy is not only on the cutting edge of music, but on the cutting edge of culture itself. And cutting edges cut both ways.

If Tommy Boy is a model of a genuine lifestyle company, it is also a reminder that such companies become lightning rods for criticism. When that lifestyle company has a highly visible parent like Time Warner, the synthesis of aesthetics and business can sometimes crack under the strain, as with the controversial political rapper Paris and his song "Bush Killa," a fantasy about presidential assassination. Under pressure from Time Warner and Warner Records, which were themselves under intense attack from police organizations for issuing Ice-T's "Cop Killer," Tommy Boy declined to release the Paris song or the album on which it appeared.

Silverman did help Paris set up the independent Scarface Records, which eventually released the album, including the song "Bush Killa." And he remains quick to defend rap against its offended detractors. He describes Tommy Boy's role as a neutral midwife for cultural trends.

"People should do what they have to do," Silverman says without apology. "If there is a market for something, people buy it; and if they don't, then there's not a market. We reflect the streets; we don't control them. We're like their newspaper. We're op-ed for the streets."

Indeed, with its highly focused vision Tommy Boy has achieved something rare in the record business: brand identity. Record buyers expect innovative music from Tommy Boy. Industry insiders expect innovative marketing. Retailers expect Tommy Boy's salespeople to urge on them only as many records as the company's precise market analyses say can be sold.

For companies outside the recording industry, the larger lessons of Tommy Boy go beyond tinkering with cross-functional teams or some other organizational-design flavor of the month. It means recognizing that to succeed in the age of identity, more companies will have to embrace the lifestyle model, which requires not the dismal science of segmentation but the difficult work of cultural knowledge. And it means working toward an organic structure capable of performing this work.