Aside from his cigar, the portly accountant couldn’t look any less a rock-and-roll impresario. But when a call comes in, his cell phone belts out “Two Minutes to Midnight,” a headbanging showstopper by heavy-metal gray hairs Iron Maiden — one of his acts.
Andy Taylor, 54, organized college dances at Cambridge University until he and friend Rod Smallwood discovered “the Maiden” in a London pub in 1979. Since then, this “least fashionable band on earth” (Taylor’s words) has sold 55 million records with scant airplay — and Taylor and Smallwood’s $248 million Sanctuary Group Plc. has become a monster hit in a flagging industry.
As the music “majors” — Universal, EMI, Warner, and Sony BMG — shed staff and ax artist rosters amid declining CD sales, Sanctuary is enjoying a five-year run of profit growth. Why? Sanctuary creates long-term, soup-to-nuts franchises around artists, many cast off by bigger labels. It’s the UK’s largest independent record company. But it’s also the biggest music-management company on the planet, looking after 120 acts. And with 150,000 songs on its books, it’s one of the largest independent owners of music intellectual property rights.
Taylor calls it a 360-degree business model. Sanctuary recognizes that CDs represent only a small slice of the public’s musical appetite. So it records the Strokes and the Libertines, among others, but it also arranges tours for 350 acts, sells merchandise at shows, and licenses the rights for commercials, movies, music downloads, and cell-phone ringtones.
