#70 Ted Cohen | Why Artist Development Died and Nobody Replaced It

In 1972, Ted Cohen talked his way through 70,000 people at a Led Zeppelin show in Atlanta. He had no ticket, no pass, and no plan beyond finding the tour manager. By Monday morning, the president of Atlantic Records had offered him a job.

The Stadium With No Ticket

Cohen had flown to Atlanta to see Led Zeppelin at Fulton County Stadium with a friend who worked as a program director. There were no tickets waiting at the box office, no cell phones, and no pagers. He walked up to a stranger near the stage entrance and asked for the tour manager. Ten minutes later, he was through.

A man standing next to the stage told him to call on Monday and handed him a business card. The name on it was Jerry Greenberg, president of Atlantic Records.

“You walked through 70,000 people. I want to hire you. What do you want to do?”

Cohen told him he wanted to work with artists. Greenberg sent him to Chicago to do exactly that. It was April 1974, and it was the start of ten years in artist development at Warner and Atlantic.

From Pre-Med to Program Director

Cohen didn’t set out for the music business. He applied to Ithaca College as a pre-med student because his mother wanted a doctor in the family, and he’d been good at science in high school. What he found on campus was a broadcasting school. A classmate mentioned that Rod Serling, the writer behind The Twilight Zone, taught screenwriting there. Cohen went to see him speak, then switched his major to communications the next day.

He was eventually sent home from Ithaca for spending too much time managing bands and running the campus station instead of studying. He landed at John Carroll University in Cleveland, where he took over the college radio station within two weeks of arriving.

Cleveland’s two commercial rock stations both changed format around the same time, and Cohen’s ten-watt college station picked up the audience the city lost. Record companies started calling to bring artists by, from Johnny Winter to Blood, Sweat & Tears. A local DJ named Billy Bass introduced him around, and a tip from a Columbia Records executive sent him driving to Cincinnati to interview for a promotion job.

“Oh no, you had the job before you ever drove down there. You just had to go do the interview.”

What Artist Development Actually Was

Cohen spends a good part of the conversation drawing a line between three jobs people confuse: A&R signs the artist, artist relations takes the band to dinner, and artist development tells them the truth.

“My job was to say, show was good tonight, could be better. You might want to move the third song to later in the set.”

He’d tell David Lee Roth to talk less on stage. He’d tell David Byrne of Talking Heads to say more than just the song title. The goal wasn’t managing image. It was building a career that could last past one album, which is why he points to Chrissie Hynde and Bonnie Raitt as proof the model worked. Both still had gravitas decades after their first records, because someone was paying attention to more than the single.

Sometimes the job looked more like stunt work than mentorship. Van Halen’s in-store appearances arrived by armored car and stagecoach, a full takeover of the record store instead of a quiet meet-and-greet. Cohen talked the Beach Boys into an in-store of their own the same way.

No Budget, No Approval Process

When Warner Bros. hired Cohen in 1974, his boss gave him one instruction: do whatever he thought he needed to do, and Warner would cover him. There was no approval process and no set budget. The only rule was that if he ever had to choose between the artist and the label, he chose the artist. Warner would benefit either way.

Cohen ran with that for a decade, spending ten months a year on the road with The Who, Van Halen, Asia, Prince, Talking Heads, and The Pretenders. Some nights that meant flying on the band’s plane. Others meant riding the bus. His travel expenses alone in 1982 came to a quarter of a million dollars, none of it on anything he’d need to explain later. He became known around the company as something specific.

“I became a forgiveness executive, not a permission executive.”

He never got fired for it. He also never stopped being asked, after the fact, who had approved what he’d just done.

The Prince Rule

Prince is the one artist Cohen says he never had a single note for. He flew to Minneapolis to decide whether to sign on for the tour, watched him play a club show, and that settled it before the conversation started. Prince didn’t do radio interviews. He didn’t do meet-and-greets. His answer to why was simple.

“The show explains me.”

Cohen got him to agree to one in-store appearance in San Francisco, at Rainbow Records. A fan reached out to touch him, he moved, and she scratched his face by accident. Prince didn’t do another in-store for almost twenty years.

Selling a Record One Radio Market at a Time

Before streaming, breaking a song meant working through a hierarchy of radio markets. Small stations in Dayton, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Tulsa played new music first. If it worked there, it moved up to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Program directors in the smaller markets would ask how a record was doing in New York before committing, which missed the entire point.

“No, you don’t understand. First it gets played in Dayton, Ohio, and then it does well, and then it maybe gets played in New York City.”

Trade papers ranked stations by tier: a P3 was a small market, a P2 was a mid-size city like Austin, and a P1 was Chicago or New York. Promotion teams tracked how many P3s and P2s were on a record before a P1 station would even consider it. Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me” took a full year to break using that ladder. Cohen says nothing gets a year anymore. Records either move immediately or they don’t move at all.

The Night He Quit Warner

Ten years into his run at Warner, King Crimson’s tour ended, and the band took Cohen to see a new movie called Spinal Tap the night it came out. Watching a mockumentary about everything that can go wrong on the road, he recognized one especially bad night of his own: an in-store appearance for the band Berlin in Providence, Rhode Island, where nobody showed up. Cohen had walked to a cash machine, pulled out $200, and paid strangers on the street $10 each to go inside and act like fans so the band wouldn’t play to an empty room.

He resigned from Warner the next day, ending ten years in artist development, and took a job running tour sponsorships at the radio network Westwood One.

The Coca-Cola Trick in a Pepsi Hall

His first assignment there was building a tour sponsorship for Coca-Cola around a Foreigner tour. The problem: several of the tour’s venues had exclusive contracts with Pepsi, which meant no Coca-Cola banners anywhere in the building.

Cohen worked around the contract instead of against it. Crew shirts read Coca-Cola presents Foreigner. Drink coolers on stage carried the branding. Merch kiosks folded out with the logo built in. None of it violated a single clause of the Pepsi deal, because none of it was a banner. By the end of the tour, Coca-Cola called it the first tour sponsorship they’d run that actually delivered.

Why Artist Development Died

Cohen is direct about why his old job doesn’t exist anymore.

“There is no artist development today. It’s gone. It became a line item.”

The Doobie Brothers released six or seven albums before going platinum. Fleetwood Mac put out eight before their 1975 self-titled record finally broke them in America. Neither band would get that runway from a label today. Once cost-cutting turned artist development into a line item, nobody was left with the job of telling an act their setlist needed reordering, or that they were talking too much between songs, or that the show wasn’t ready yet. Cohen isn’t nostalgic about the money. He’s specific about what the money bought: someone whose only job was making sure the artist survived long enough to get good.

A Beach Ball, deadmau5, and the Ringling Brothers

The instinct for connecting people hasn’t slowed down for Cohen since. A few years ago, inventor Pasquale Totaro showed him Oddball, a sensor-loaded ball that doubles as a Bluetooth MIDI controller. Cohen gave one to deadmau5, who loved it but worried about throwing something hard into a crowd. He passed the idea to a friend running digital and marketing for Feld Entertainment, the company behind Ringling Bros. and Monster Jam, who is now looking at it for the circus’s kids market.

None of it puts a dollar in Cohen’s pocket. It’s the same habit that got him consulting on The Roadie, a rugged Bluetooth speaker from a small audio company called Rocksteady: see something worth building, connect it to someone who can build it, and let it work out or not.

Don’t Be a Dick

Cohen has a habit of pocketing bar coasters. One of them reads a two-word message he liked enough to laminate, and he still puts it on the table before negotiating a deal.

“I will put this on the table and I go, this isn’t for you. It’s for us. Neither one of us has to be a jerk about getting the deal done.”

It sums up how he describes fifty years of relationships in an industry built on favors: help people without keeping score, and when you’re wrong, say so plainly instead of explaining it away. Five decades later, he’s teaching at the University of Tulsa and running TAG Strategic, still making the same argument he made to a Warner executive in 1974: take care of the artist first, and the rest works itself out.

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