Friends From a City School Back Most Downloaded Album in Europe
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Three buddies who met at a New York City high school are behind the most downloaded album in European history, “St. Elsewhere” by Gnarls Barkley, which is the first no. 1 hit based solely on the Internet.
Downtown Recordings launched out of a SoHo loft in January, the collaboration of three graduates of Riverdale Country Day School. In April, “St. Elsewhere” in Britain became the first album in the history of the music business to hit no.1 based on the number of Internet downloads alone without a physical album being released. “St. Elsewhere” debuted in America last month and is now no. 14 on the charts. Its first single, “Crazy,” is getting heavy radio play on both rock and urban radio stations.
Although the music business has been hit hard in recent years by illegal Internet downloading, the label’s chairman, Josh Deutsch, said that legal downloading was the springboard for Gnarls Barkley.
“In this case, it was the digital downloading that got the record to no. 1 and it didn’t cannibalize the sales,” Mr. Deutsch said. “The digital distribution future has a lot of opportunities for people who are entrepreneurial.”
Mr. Deutsch was a member of Riverdale’s class of 1979, along with Downtown Recording’s general manager, Terence Lam, and its financier, John Josephson, a managing director at the investment bank Allen & Company who has experience in expanding small, creative companies. Messrs. Deutsch and Lam each had extensive careers in the music business before launching the label in January.
“The core percentage of the student body of a private school like Riverdale goes to Wall Street or into medicine or law,” Mr. Lam said. “But there is always the 5 or 10% that take a more artsy route.” Although the creative side of the label is small, they partnered with Atlantic Records to market and distribute the releases through its massive distribution network.
“Kids don’t care if it’s a large label or small label, they just care if they like the song,” Mr. Deutsch said.
Messrs. Deutsch and Lam used to commute to their high school in the Bronx from northern New Jersey, often aboard the “Tenafly Taxi.” Now they say they rarely go north of 14th Street in Manhattan toward Midtown, where most of the major labels are located.
