Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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”Not in two years or five years. Right now. A fifteen-year-old in London with a guitar. A fourteen-year-old in Ontario who doesn’t know yet what kind of artist she is. An eleven-year-old in Barbados who walked into a competition and stood there like she owned it.” He paused. ”We’re talking about them like positions on a board, which is necessary. But it should sit underneath everything that they’re people, and they’re going to trust us with something significant. That has a weight to it that the financial projections don’t capture.”

Nobody spoke.

”And let’s not pretend this is charity,” Marvin continued. ”It’s good business.”

A few heads around the table nodded.

”If we become known as the company that actually looks after its artists, families will come to us first instead of wondering what we’re trying to hide. Managers will pick up the phone. Agents will return our calls. The best young talent will want to sign here because they’ll know they aren’t walking into a machine that burns people up and spits them out.” He folded his hands on the table. ”Reputation compounds. So does trust.”

Max Martin smiled faintly. ”It also saves money,” he added. ”Healthy artists cancel fewer sessions, miss fewer performances, recover faster from tours, and make better records.”

”Exactly,” Marvin said. ”Companies always focus on what support costs. They rarely calculate what neglect costs.”

”And there’s another reason,” Marvin said. ”For lack of a better analogy...”

He paused, searching for the right words. ”I don’t want sprinters. I want thoroughbreds.”

A few people around the table exchanged glances. ”A lot of companies run an artist as hard as they possibly can. One massive album. One exhausting world tour. Every endorsement they can squeeze in. Every television appearance. Every magazine cover. They keep pushing until there’s nothing left to give.”

He shook his head. ”That’s shortsighted.”

”I’d rather have an artist who can run for twenty years. Let them sprint when the moment calls for it. Then let them rest. Let them live. Let them come back hungry.”

His fingers tapped the table once. ”A star who shines for two decades is worth more than ten artists who burn brilliantly for a single summer.”

He looked around the room. ”I don’t want to extract every last dollar from them while they’re young. I want to build people whose names become assets in their own right. Eventually, they reach a point where simply existing creates value. A new album becomes an event. A tour sells itself. A film role makes headlines before a single frame is shot. Brands line up. Studios compete. Every project they touch becomes more valuable simply because they’re attached to it.”

He looked from face to face.

A faint smile crossed his face.

”That’s when you’ve stopped managing an artist.”

”That’s when you’ve built an institution.”

He glanced around the room.

”I don’t want one spectacular album followed by burnout. I don’t want one world tour that leaves someone so exhausted they disappear for three years. That’s a terrible investment—for them and for us.”

Edward Holt nodded thoughtfully. ”The lifetime value is exponentially higher.”

Marvin smiled. ”That’s the point.”

He leaned back. ”If we do our jobs properly, they’ll have careers measured in decades, not quarters.”

”And every young artist watching from the outside,” Max added, ”will know exactly where they want to sign.”

”Which means,” Marvin finished, ”we’ll spend less time and money convincing extraordinary talent to join us... because they’ll already be convinced before we ever walk into the room. In fact we would be their dream label.”

A quiet understanding settled over the table.

Taking care of artists wasn’t just the right thing to do.

It was one of the strongest competitive advantages a company could build.

Max looked at him for a moment with the particular expression he occasionally had when Marvin articulated something Max had felt but wouldn’t say aloud in a business meeting.

Then he nodded once and picked up his pen. ”Agreed,” he said, and moved them forward.

....

...

..

.

David Chung had been perfectly still through most of the morning with the focused, coiled energy of someone who understood his moment hadn’t arrived yet. When the conversation finally turned to the music video question, he set his pen down and straightened his spine.

”MTV called again,” Max said. He delivered this piece of information directly to Marvin rather than to the room. ”Third time in two months. They want a video for *That Girl* that will be out in one day by Colombia. They’ve also offered to go back and work with anything from the first EP if there’s a visual to attach to it. The *Unstoppable* single. Frankly, Marvin, they’re asking about all of it.”

”I know,” Marvin said.

”They’re not wrong to ask. You have five top-charting releases, seven songs in the top ten, and this new track is easily going to be number one... and you have no music video presence. In 1999, that’s an unusual, almost suicidal position for a pop star.”

”It’s a deliberate position.”

Max paused, choosing his words. ”I understand that. But the window doesn’t stay open indefinitely. MTV’s rotation politics are real and they hold grudges. The relationship you build with them now, while they desperately want you, determines what you get from them later when you inevitably need them.” He said this carefully, in the tone he used when making a point he expected fierce resistance on but had decided to make anyway. ”I’m not saying release something that isn’t right. I’m saying we need a concrete plan.”

The room took on the electrified space where something monumental was about to be decided.

Marvin slowly turned his head, his gaze locking onto David Chung.

Chung took this as the invitation it was. ”You want me to make the case,” he said, adjusting his suit jacket.

”I want you to tell us what you know,” Marvin instructed.

Chung nodded and gathered himself. He had the manner of someone who had spent years preparing to be useful in exactly this kind of room, surrounded by future titans, and was not going to waste the opportunity.

”In 90s,” Chung began, his voice clear and projecting perfectly, ”a high-budget music video is not optional for a commercially serious artist. That’s the short version. The longer version is significantly more interesting.” He paused, looking around the table. ”MTV’s *Total Request Live* (TRL) launched in September of last year, and it has changed the dynamic in a way that the old guard in the label business is still struggling to catch up with. It’s not just a showcase anymore—it’s a direct chart mechanism. The request culture around TRL is driving physical sales in a way that is immediately measurable and massive. A video in heavy rotation on TRL is worth, conservatively, between fifty and one hundred fifty thousand in incremental album sales in the first month of rotation alone. That’s the conservative estimate. For an act with a massive existing fanbase and no prior video presence—like Marvin—the number is exponentially higher because the pent-up demand amplifies the impact.”

”Cost per video,” Voss interjected, wielding the focus of a man who kept one eye permanently fixed on expenditure as a professional survival habit.

”At the level of production quality that makes sense for an artist at Marvin’s commercial tier,” Chung countered smoothly, ”you’re looking at one hundred and fifty to five hundred thousand dollars per video for an outside director with a strong track record. For something with a true cinematic ambition—the kind of visual that doesn’t just accompany the song but becomes its own cultural object—you’re at the higher end, or well above it.”

”And the return on that spend,” Hendricks pressed, ”across album sales and catalog activation, is what multiple?”

”If the video performs well—high rotation, fan response, media coverage—the multiple is somewhere between three and ten. On a song that already has immense commercial momentum.” Chung paused for effect. ”On *My Heart Will Go On*, retroactively, the number would have been extraordinary. But that ship has sailed. *That Girl*, however, is an active, bleeding opportunity.”

Max watched Marvin, who had been listening with the placid attention that meant he had arrived at his conclusions months ago and was simply waiting to see whether the conversation would finally catch up to them.

”We’re not going to keep paying outside directors exorbitant fees,” Marvin said, his voice cutting the debate.

Chung didn’t look surprised. ”No, sir.”

”Walk them through the plan I laid out in Los Angeles,” Marvin commanded.

Chung had prepared for this, and the preparation showed brilliantly. He spoke for twenty unbroken minutes without significant interruption. That silence was a testament to the quality of what he was saying, because the people around that table didn’t sit through twenty minutes of anything they weren’t finding highly valuable.

The core proposition was this: Meyers Music Group desperately needed to build an in-house music video production unit. Not a vanity operation. Not a bloated cost center dressed up as a ’creative initiative.’ A functioning, bleeding-edge production infrastructure—cameras, lighting equipment, crews, technical staff, editing bays, and a small, hungry stable of developing directors—that could execute high-quality video content at a fraction of the external cost, all while building internal capability that would, over time, become an asset in its own right.

The immediate economics were brilliantly straightforward. The group currently had multiple acts generating significant commercial activity: the Backstreet Boys, whose video budget needs were real, massive, and ongoing; Marvin himself, whose complete video absence was becoming a strategic gap; and the smaller developing acts being funneled through Wolf Cousins, Cheiron, and Maratone, whose video needs were more modest but whose production costs added up quickly across a full roster.

Bringing this production entirely in-house, Chung argued, and the cost differential against external rates, spread across the group’s full output over a three-year period, was in the range of eight to twelve million dollars. Eight to twelve million dollars that, if spent on external Hollywood directors, left the group with nothing but the finished video tapes.

Eight to twelve million dollars that, if invested in internal infrastructure, built a physical facility, a dedicated team, and a vast body of institutional knowledge that didn’t disappear the moment a project wrapped.

”That’s the basic financial case,” Chung said, leaning forward. ”The interesting case is what comes after.”

He described the pipeline. Music video production was one of the most rigorous training grounds for visual storytelling in the commercial space. The constraints were crushing—three to five minutes to tell a story, a rigidly fixed budget, the need to serve the song while simultaneously building the artist’s visual identity, and usually doing it with a shooting schedule measured in days rather than weeks.

Directors who survived this pressure cooker environment and thrived in it emerged with a set of skills—economy, speed, and the ability to communicate complex emotional content through compressed visual language. These skills translated directly into commercial feature film and television work.

The history of the industry was already filled with names that had started in the trenches of music videos and moved into massive feature films: David Fincher, Michael Bay, Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek. This was not a coincidence. It was a proof of concept.

”Build a pipeline,” Chung pitched, his eyes alight. ”Bring in talented people who are early in their careers—people who haven’t yet had the opportunity to develop their voice at a professional level. Give them resources, a stable production environment, and a steady stream of projects. Let them grow on our catalogue. The ones who develop into something exceptional, we move into longer-form film work when the opportunity arises in Meyers’s film division. The ones who become excellent music video directors stay and keep producing excellent music video content. Either outcome is a massive win.”

”And the external revenue question?” Moss asked, seeing the whole board.

”Comes in phase two,” Chung answered instantly. ”Once the facility and the team have a proven track record—once we’ve produced a body of work that the industry can assess and envy—other labels will want access. Smaller labels that can’t afford to build their own infrastructure, that currently hire freelance crews at exorbitant rates that eat their video budgets alive. We offer them production services at competitive rates with quality that far exceeds what they can get elsewhere. At that point, the unit entirely stops being a cost center and starts carrying its own weight. It prints money.”

”And the VEVO question,” Max said softly. He had been waiting for this exact part.

Chung acknowledged it with a nod. VEVO was not yet a reality in the outside world—it would not become a reality until 2009—but the concept of a massive, owned video distribution platform, a destination rather than a dependency, was already deeply present in Marvin’s thinking. Marvin understood exactly where the internet was going to take the relationship between music and visual content.

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