Phone Interview with Rohit Kohli, Manager of Boys like Girls

So, I called up one of my childhood friends Rohit Kohli, who I haven’t seen in 10 years.  He works for Ozone Entertainments, which is a management company based in New York.  He was happy to talk with me about the industry from a manager’s standpoint and then set me up with a friend of his who works for and Independent Label.

He told me that he personally hadn’t worked much with many independent labels because his band, Boys Like Girls, were more on the pop side of things, and thus worked with majors mainly.  He did say that he greatly preferred working with indies because they had so much less red tape and he didn’t have to deal with a huge bureaucracy of people.  He talked about how in the music industry there was a very “low signal to noise ratio”, which was an expression I liked  a lot.  Basically, there is so much music out there (the noise) that it is hard for people to find the music they want to hear (the signal).  So, the record label’s main job was marketing.  While a manager could handle some things, a record label would have a specific advertising and marketing team etc and more contacts.  A manager would rather be using his/her time doing something else.

He also told me to look into a couple of new things.  One is the 360 deal, where basically the label takes money from concert revenues etc, which used to all go to the artists, because it claims that record sales are what lead to the high concert turnout.  He also brought up that EMI, one of the major labels, had been divided between Universal and WMG, which showed how the majors were taking a big hit.