How to know if it's the right time to sell - UK's greatest record producer behind Sade, Sting, Clapton etc. | Sir Robin Millar

0:03It's got to be real from the get go, and you've got to be prepared to walk the walk, go the miles, do the distance, be prepared to graft and be so certain and confident that your business plan was for you and it's got to be prepared to be prepared to be prepared to be ready to go. Welcome to Secret Leaders. Today I'm joined by Sir Robin Miller. As one of the world's leading record producers, he's worked with the likes of Sade, Randy Crawford, Eric Clapton, Sting, The Grateful Dead and many, many others. And if that wasn't enough, he also produced the Atlanta Olympic Games opening ceremony in 1996.

0:47He's gained over 160 gold and platinum discs, including 44 number one hits, representing over 400 million pounds of sales worldwide, bringing over 300 million pounds in overseas income to the UK. In 2010, Robin stepped away from full-time music production to concentrate on his public and charitable roles. Robin now continues his mission to unlock potential in disabled applicants for key roles on public, private and third sector boards. So, Robin, welcome to Secret Leaders. Thank you very much, Dan. Delighted to be here. Okay, there is something unusual and surprising that connects you and me. And I'm going to start this interview in a totally different way to how I've ever started any interview.

1:33Go for it. You're blind? I'm blind, Dan. You have retinitis pigmentosa? I have retinitis pigmentosa. And my dad had retinitis pigmentosa. Fabulous. So I have a lived, I'm probably unlike other people who generally have interviewed you, I have a lived experience of growing up with a father who is blind and had retinitis pigmentosa for certainly all the life that I've lived with him. He passed away 10 years ago. Sorry to hear that. And when I was reading your brief and I was, you know, reading about you and learning more in prep for the interview, there's so much that you have to share that is so relatable to me in a unique way.

2:12And the only other person I ever really heard talk about this kind of stuff was my dad. Which I wouldn't know, of course, you know, because I'm just me. So I'm as interested in that, your experience as you are, to be honest. Thank you. I guess the things that I wanted to share was you have two, I think, unique points that you like to make. And they were things that my dad said to you. The first is being blind is amazing. It is. My dad didn't necessarily describe being blind as amazing in those ways but what he always referred to obviously is when you have a humongous physical uh you know disability a disability regardless whether it's physical mental whatever but when you have a clear disability you have to rely on other ways to navigate the world and it can unlock a totally different life experience that makes things extremely unique to you and can be a superpower.

3:07I 100 % agree with what you just said. And I'm going to come on to that from your lived experience. And then the second thing I wanted to share was my dad started a company and ran it his whole life, basically. So when I grew up, my dad was a business owner, which ironically, I'm now an entrepreneur, and I never wanted to be one because it caused terrible stress and poor health for him, which always really put me off until he actually passed away. And then I decided I was going to do it anyway. But I think the thing that really resonated with me when I was learning about your journey, which is very similar to my dad's, is no one would employ him because he was blind.

3:41So he couldn't get a job. So he started his own company and he employed 200 people and absolutely loved what he did. And you know what? Like similar to you, when people would be like, how on earth is a blind guy, a famous record producer? My dad, you know, his in gag was that he actually ran a fashion manufacturing business. and everyone's like you can't see the fucking clothes um so a lot of shared experience here which i'm finding highly relatable that is my experience as the son of someone who is blind and thrilling that's thrilling to me it's been it's been it's rare i've never actually had a proper conversation with someone else who has uh lived with retinitis pigmentosa blind and has positive things to share about being blind or having a disability so i wanted to start there Tell me why being blind is amazing, Robin.

4:30Being blind is amazing, Dan. Every day is an adventure. I mean, getting out of your bedroom and bathroom is an adventure because you don't know what's in front of you. Getting out of your apartment in the morning, you've already had five or six adventures. So you've got to be up for it. And every day is a leap into the unknown with infinite faith. and if you don't have that infinite faith I think you you would become fearful and timid and what it's done for me is to move from bravery which is definitely how I negotiated poor vision not no vision growing up as a child and a young person it was bravery it was deep breath time then that bravery gives way to fearlessness which is a very different thing it means that you don't experience that fear you move you move beyond that fear so your boundaries open up so yeah you start by getting out of your bathroom getting out of your apartment and you end up going on your own by playing to los angeles and living with the grateful dead for a year not really in advance thinking my goodness me this is going to be a very difficult thing just wow this is going to be an amazing adventure and of course you're absorbing the sounds the smells the the relationships within people the climate all the rest of it you have a very full and abundant experience a common fallacy for people that you meet who imagine that being blind is like them putting a bag over their head and I equate this to if you approach a piano never having played it before.

6:15You'll take tentative steps and you'll play a couple of notes timidly. If you practice the piano 16 hours a day, the way that I practice being blind 16 hours a day, five to 10 years later, you're flying over the keyboards, you're playing Prokofiev, the music's not in front of you on the stand, and you're as far away from the imagined experience of people coming to you saying, I can't imagine how terrible is being blind. And I just go, well, I'll agree. You can't imagine what it's like being blind because I am the concert pianist of no vision. That is beautifully put. Although I will say one thing, my dad did have the black and bluest legs ever.

7:01Do you escape that with your practice or you also happen to? No, no, no. Ulcers, black and blue. I've got a bit of a mark here on my forehead. I think that was my bathroom mirror. Yeah, still happens. No, but you just brush it off. You just go like that and you just brush it off. No different from a rugby player. You feel it afterwards. You know, you go home and you nurse your wounds. But at the time, you do become very hardy. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's an incredible way to build resilience, right? And resilience is exactly the core ingredient that you need to live, I think, a successful life.

7:38It's not just about entrepreneurs or music or anything like that. To have a successful life, you need to be able to face challenges and get back on your feet when life knocks you down. And how often do you literally physically get knocked down when you're blind? My dad was Irish. He was ex-army. He boxed for the army, played rugby for the army. And in his infinite wisdom at the age of nine, he enrolled me in a boxing club. And I had, I'm going to guess 55 fights. I don't recall winning any of them, but I recall going for it every time. People soon learned that if they sent a jab straight at me, I could see it and fend it off.

8:19But the looping haymaker, the uppercut, anything coming from the side with tunnel vision, I missed them. So I'd get clubbed without knowing they were coming. Years and years later, I sat down with my dad and I said why did you do that actually why did you do that why did you persevere when I used to come back black and blue and he said I knew that when you went through life you were going to get hurt and I wanted you to get used to getting hurt and moving forwards anyway and I wouldn't recommend this to other people as necessarily the right way to approach a child with a disability, but it worked for me.

8:59He pushed me out on a bike. I said, I want to cycle to Brighton. My mother was probably hiding under the bedclothes thinking, oh my goodness me, this is a nightmare. And he'd say, no, go on, off you go. Go on, have fun. And of course, I came off the bike two or three times, mangled the bike lots of times. I kept riding a bike until I rode in Kensington High Street until I rode into a stationary red double-decker bus. And I figured, well, if I didn't see that coming, it might be time to move on to other things. Good. Yeah, exactly. So you create your own barriers of self-awareness as well. Okay, Robin, you've got a very, I don't know what to call it, you know, a colourful life, let's call it.

9:42And that colour, that colour of your life really starts in the music industry. So something you said to me just before we got chatting as well, which I think is really important. You're a commercial music producer, you're in the game to make money because you know i was positing to you this is a business audience we often have like people who make music in a business podcast typically speaking and yet we're totally industry agnostic right we want to talk to pioneers and leaders who built meaningful businesses understand how to drive revenue build culture live values and know how to fail and succeed so it's an interesting thing isn't it because when you think about music you don't necessarily think about the business side of it.

10:23So give us a snapshot of your music career and give us a snapshot of the financial implications, the jobs, the people around you, the money made, the success. When I left college, I had a record deal with Atlantic Records as a very young person. And I thought then I wanted to be an artist. And then once I started flogging around the world, first of all, I thought, this isn't necessarily playing to my strengths. But secondly, I was fascinated and obsessed by the recording studio the process I applied for jobs every recording studio in the UK and that's when I first ran up against the fact that people were worried about employing someone with dim sight we'd kick over microphones or we wouldn't be able to see the knobs I went to France and I actually got a gig at a French studio by complete chance and the guy that owned the studio in the evening because the French like to have dinner after a session and he said you seem very interested in all the equipment Robin I said yes I am I love it and he said have you ever thought of training as a producer as an engineer I said well yes but and I took a deep breath and I said you know I was a bit ashamed Dan of of not having good vision It didn't seem very cool to me.

11:43A lot of people still hide hidden disabilities. And I was just on the cusp of mostly being able to get away with it, but with some quite bad bits of misunderstanding. He said, oh, don't worry about that. We can we can work around that. I still use that when I'm talking to business leaders and entrepreneurs. 50 years later, 40 something years later, I see that one moment where someone acknowledges your disability and says, don't worry about it, we can work around that. So I spent three years in France and by complete luck, it coincided with this studio called Le Chateau, becoming the coolest studio in the world, total fluke.

12:25So I trained there for three years and worked there for another two years I saw David Bowie record some of Low, most of Heroes, Elton John record Honky Chateau, Madman Across the Water, Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac, the whole of Jesus Christ Superstar. So I watched very successful records being made and I watched the dynamic between the producer, the person in charge and the artist. And I also, of course, sat in on a lot of sessions where the records weren't successful. and in my mind's eye I was starting to learn what it was that was the difference and the difference was that there was a sort of confluence of ambition that the artist needed to have that ambition and the producer needed to share that ambition with the artist and that's when I started making when I came back to England in 1980 I started to make good choices and my good choices were first of all, find the artist who wants it really, really badly.

13:33And it's going to work as hard at that as they are in the studio. But they had to work hard in the studio because the name of the game was make the best record you can and then do everything possible to draw people's attention to it. The second thing I asked when I was taking on a project from the record company was, is this a priority? Are you going to put marketing dollars behind it? And I suppose that's when I learned another great truth. You know, Dan, I would never put 50 pence into someone who came to me with a business plan, however good it was. And I said, OK, where's the marketing spent?

14:09Well, we're going to spend 1 % on marketing. I go, then you will fail. I want to see 15%, maybe 20%. I wouldn't even be frightened of 50 % that it's got to be marketed. Could I tell you the other great thing that I learned? Once again, from the guys that ran the Chateau, they had paid work, which kept the lights on and kept the staff employed, mostly weekdays. And being France, they're mostly knocked off at dinner time. And this guy said, we've got this very valuable studio time, evenings and weekends, we think we should record some of these young up and coming bands. And Robin, because you're the nearest to their age and you don't mind working around the clock, you can record them.

14:55So I started recording them. And on a tape box at the bottom left-hand corner, there's a little space. There's the artist, the track title, the time of the track, all the technical stuff. Bottom left-hand corner, there's a little box which says producer. producer I'd written in Elton John's producer Gus Dudgeon David Bowie's producer Tony Visconti Arif Mardin Saturday Night Fever and then this box with nothing in it so being opportunistic I wrote Robin Miller in the box one of these artists got an underground reputation and got signed to a label and the record came out and of course they just look at the label copy on the tape box and the record came out and it said producer Robin Miller and it was a it was more than an underground hit and less than a mainstream hit you know it was an indie cult hit so suddenly all the record companies were piling in it was it was about just post-punk time of new wave all these bands French bands Telephone Trust Edit Nilo Lily Drop and I was working with all sometimes I could just write down engineer.

16:01Sometimes I could write down producer. And so when I came to London, I tried to raise money with a young accountant called Patrick McKenna, who went on to found Ingenious Media. He was hugely successful. He was a young accountant. He sent me around the city with a business plan. And the business plan was this young guy will buy a studio. He will rent out studio time to paying clients and he will record during free time and he will own the recordings because I had found out by that time that if you pay for the recordings you own them and I had this little skinny one-page agreement that I would get artists to sign which said you're going to work with me and I'm going to own the recordings and the first thing I did was a charity record for Chilean Solidarity and I summoned any musicians who could play Latin jazz but 30 people turned up we had a good time we made the record the record was released on Virgin the following afternoon a manager rang up and said I managed this band called they were called Pride it was the Sade band they were called Pride two of the members of the band played in your studio last night they had a good time they thought you did a good job corralling 30 people any chance we could come and visit you so they came and visited me and I heard very rough demos of two songs your lover's king and smooth operator basically a rhythm track and a scratch vocal so I said okay we'll do a week with you we recorded six of the 10 tracks that became the album diamond life got them to sign a one page piece of paper we finished the record the manager started taking the record round got no interest from the record companies and Sade's boyfriend at the time Robert Elms was a very cool young journalist and he got all his mates from national newspapers to come to the global village in Charing Cross and a hastily put together gig 600 people turned away at the door.

18:14The reason they were turned away at the door was because he'd got Sade on the front page of the face, saying the face of 84. And suddenly all the record companies who weren't interested in this rather jazzy stuff, this was at the time when drum machines and electronics, Blumange, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, all the record companies had thought that's what we've got to have. But because of her sudden notoriety, they all wanted to sign up. Very interesting thing, Dan. The same record companies that had turned the records down six months later, came queuing to the door. And years later, Rob Dickens, the head of Warners, I told him that story.

19:01And he said, ah, yes, the music business, one thing you have to learn, Robin, is if we say no in March and then something changes and we say yes in September you don't mention it and we don't mention it suddenly she had a record deal and I owned the recordings well she had a choice of record deals she she took the record deal that gave her the most control they said we can send you to America and work with Michael Jackson's producer Quincy Jones and she said no I'm quite happy working in Wilsdon with Robin Miller thank you do you reckon Michael Jackson had the same chat with Quincy? I don't know.

19:38The record company offered me 12 ,000 quid to sell them the tapes, which was a lot of dough for me in those days. And I had a young friend who was just setting up on his own, a lawyer from Harbottle and Lewis, Andrew Thompson. And he said, you know, you don't need to sell them the records. You can license the records on an annual basis, which is what I did. And I didn't actually sell that music back to Sony until 1997. And in 1997, you know, people think that selling out means selling out. It doesn't. I mean, I actually retained all my income stream as a record producer. I actually upped my royalties as a record producer, but I handed over the copyrights and the masters, you know, for a substantial amount of money.

20:31I used that business model until 1990, when the studio climate changed, the Apple Mac, meant that a lot of recordings could be done more cheaply than renting big studios. But so I then I sold, I'd acquired the same sort of rights in exchange for studio time with eight or nine, I'm not going to say who they were, but the household names now, starting off. And I sold that business in 1990 for£4 million, which was amazing. And I knew that it was time to get out. Don't keep businesses too long. Sell them on the rise. Let someone else earn the last dollar. Don't wait for the plateau, because the plateau can happen very quickly.

21:18It's happening right now. There's been one... It's a very hard thing to know, though, Robin. So sorry to interrupt you, but I guess like there's a valuable lesson in here that you're trying to share. And at the same time, it's also very much a je ne sais quoi. So how do you get a sense of that? Is it when a big technology change comes along, no matter what it is? So in this case, like you just mentioned Apple. And so because you're unable to predict what that might do to the market, you're like, that feels in my gut like a good moment or opportunity? Or is there something more strategic than that?

21:50You've got to have your antennae out for how the pressures are changing. You've got to look at what else is happening around you in the marketplace. I was talking to other studio owners. I was getting increasing pushback from record companies on the daily rate and the daily price. And they started saying like, well, we can make some of this record, not all of it, on an Apple Mac. So we'll just use your studio for the drums and the mixing. So at the first sign that the market might be on the change, I'm looking to exit. Really, really good insight. Thank you. And I suppose, you know, what's going on with AI music at the moment, again, would be another tell.

22:28You don't know exactly. Things are changing in the dynamic of the marketplace itself. So unless you're at the forefront of that, maybe it's a really good time to consider getting out. I agree. I agree. Don't have that level of expertise. We sold up the business we started in 2013. We sold in 2019. My partners were not necessarily in agreement with me. I said, look, now is the time when we'll get a great price. We may not get the greatest price. We sold, well, I did a share swap and kept, as I said, you don't have to sell everything. I kept a minority interest in three of the four companies. But we sold in 2019.

23:04And things continued to snowball through 2021, 22, hypnosis. and then suddenly interest rates go up. So the money that hypnosis borrowed to buy music rights from superstars, they were suddenly paying 10, 12%, not 6, 7 % coupon on their money. And of course, shareholders are notoriously jittery and jumpy and short-sighted. And the first rumblings of shareholder unease at not getting their dividend and now everyone's running for the door and now the the value of music sales and music assets is starting to plunge and it will drop like a stone now over the next 12 months yeah wrongly probably but it will yeah i see that so yeah i guess i want to touch on you you were starting to talk about you know studios you got out at four million pounds and at that moment i'm sure feeling you know happy for yourself right because that is a considerable amount of money to be making at a young age I've also heard this story about Abbey Road Studios and I wanted to know a little bit more about that what was the circumstances around that how did you get involved how did you almost become part of that history when I started business mentoring which was in the early noughties.

24:31It was quite simple, quite naive. I'd learned to work with singers and look for truth and truth that would come out of the speakers to people who didn't know the singer, never met the singer. They could be walking around Tesco and something in that vocal would touch something in people and make them believe it. So I started applying this in quite a sort of simplistic way in mentoring business leaders who were about to go and talk to the troops, rally the troops, or talk about a major new partnership. And I ended up in the boardroom of EMI. And they had just unsuccessfully tried to merge with Warner Music, and they were just getting interest from Guy Hands, venture capitalist.

25:23I worked with Eric Niccoli, the then head of EMI, fantastic guy and I was the first thing I did was I listened to him sharing a stage with Mr Apple the late great Mr Apple about a joint venture and he was talking to the EMI troops in a packed Abbey Road after the chat we went back and I said okay I'm going to pay that back to you. All the time you were talking about this fantastic new joint venture with Apple, your voice came out shallow, it dropped in front of you, your chest was tight. And then you finished that part of it and you started talking to your people about why you believed in your people.

26:16And without changing how much you were pushing your voice, your voice was coming out stronger, slightly deeper. You'd squared up, your shoulders had changed position. Anyway, Guy bought the business. And the day he bought the business, I walked into EMI. And Eric said, he's sacked me. The good news, Robin, is I've just renewed your consultancy agreement for 12 months and put it in the filing cabinet on my way out of the door. Bless you, Eric. So six weeks later, phone rang and it was Guy. And I have to say at this point, by the way, a lot of the thinking that Guy had around EMI was absolutely spot on.

26:59Like, this is ridiculous. Why can't we make money out of a band that is selling a quarter of a million records? There's something wrong with this picture. There are four labels at EMI. There's one primetime Friday night show, Jonathan Ross, three of the four labels are submitting a single to get played on that key show on the same Friday. Why is nobody talking? So many things. But of course, he wasn't a music person. And he didn't understand that unlike Biscuits, rock stars are temperamental, willful, they can dry up. So if he's banking on the Coldplay album coming through for his Q1 results, and Chris Martin just hasn't written anything.

27:46Q1 is a disaster. So I think he was already quite confused. And also he decided he needed cash. So he said, I want you to sell Abbey Road as soon as possible. So EMI owned Abbey Road at that point, right? So I said, okay, all right. So I thought about it. I looked around and I ended up with Paul Allen's office, the other half of Microsoft, who I knew had already 15 recording studios around the world and had started the Rock and Roll Heritage Museum in Seattle. I got a very substantial offer for Abbey Road. This was all good until Chris Evans and Gary Barlow decided that they wanted to go on a crusade saying, Vulture Guy Hands sells Jewel in UK Music's Crown to the Americans.

28:41So I got a call from Guernsey at seven in the morning going, this is terrible. This is terrible. This is a PR disaster. And I think more or less said, it's your fault, Robin. Stop the sale. Stop the sale immediately. So the sale fell through and I did very, very little more for him in that time. So and ironically, of course after i'd left he needed to sell back to city group city group in a fire sale sold emi to universal so universal owned by a french water company then owned abbey road to you take you take your pick really which is which is better paul allen an absolute devotee of music who had pledged to put the money in, put a foundation, a lump sum in to ensure it would always stay a recording studio or a French water company.

29:35Universal, through antitrust laws, had to sell part of EMI to Warners, and Warners in their turn had to sell part of what they bought, same anti-competition, and that included Chrysalis. Of course, I knew Chrysalis from doing all the financial work with EMI back in 26, 27, 28. And I saw what it was going under the hammer for in 2013. Jeremy LaSalle's very experienced record company man came to me and said, I want to start a startup. I've never started a startup. I've only worked for big record companies. I've got a good idea. And it was a good idea to start an integrated music company with a catalogue, very like the recording studios down the recording studios turnover their overhead was paid by paid customers working nine to five Monday to Friday that that was their break even so the venture was to use free time don't charge for it but look at the upside so very similar situation Jeremy said if we get a record catalogue or a publishing catalogue, that'll pay, that'll take 15 people to run it.

30:54Mining that catalogue, which I knew had been very, very neglected, because it had changed hands, remember, you know, three times. I knew it was neglected. So I knew, perfect example, Nothing Compares to by Schneider-Connor was not available on Spotify, along with hundreds, thousands of other tracks. So we chose Chrysalis. We put in 400k to start up in 2014. We got Chrysalis in 2016. On a good old fashioned model, I said, we don't want bank borrowing. We really don't want bank borrowing. So we did a deal with Cobalt that they would get an exclusive distribution deal for Chrysalis for, I think it was five years, and they would advance us against a higher than usual royalty rate.

31:45They'd advance us all the money to buy Chrysalis, which they did. So we bought Chrysalis. And instead of the normals of 8%, 10%, we were paying a 30 % distribution fee, which I knew we could just about break even on. And that gave us the money to support managers who were working on their own, overworked, under-resourced. Here's a room full of 15 people. We're putting out 30, 40 records a year. We can protect you by telling you what your record company are doing right or wrong. We can make sure all your tracks are registered. We can do all your financial administration and leave you to get to work.

32:24And the first two managers we signed up, one of them looked after a band called Cigarettes After Sex, who were playing three, 400-seaters. And the other was an American artist called Phoebe Bridges, who was touring around America in a car, playing to 400 or 500-seaters. I'm still 25 % shelter of the management company. Phoebe has just sold out Madison Square Gardens, 22 ,000 tickets. Cigarettes after sex play on average 9 ,000, 10 ,000-seaters in 20 countries. And having that resource to cover the overhead allowed us to resource those managers. Very crucial things like if you're touring America, you've got to tour with them because there'll be predatory managers backstage saying, where's your manager?

33:13Doesn't he come to your gigs? Our management company, we come to all the gigs. You have to protect your talent. Yeah. So yeah, that's the short version of EMI, Abbey Road and then Chrysalis. Okay. And so for Chrysalis, what was the outcome? As in, where did this journey end up, so to speak, with your involvement? Well, we started the company for 400 grand. We sold it in 2019 in a mixture of a share swap for Reservoir, the American company who were going to invest. They wanted the catalogue because they're a catalogue company, really. We retained a minority stake in the publishing company, the management company, and the frontline record company.

33:54and we sold it for 40 million in 2019. And both of us were on a three-year earn out. Mine finished at the beginning of end of 2022. Jeremy has elected to stay on. It's his love. You know, the money's there, deep pockets. We can put out a lot more records now. We can sign up more artists, the management company. And I stepped down and walked away. So free agent. and free agent to do, I'm assuming, follow some of your passions. So that takes us nicely into, I think, a really important life lesson and a really important aspect to your career. And I'm making a huge assumption here, by the way, but you know, knighthood to a sir, I'm assuming that doesn't all come down to your music success, probably comes down to your principles and to the way that you live your life and support others.