Since 2001, Ed St John has been the Chairman of the ARIA Awards and the ARIA Hall of Fame. In January 2005 he became President and CEO of Warner Music after managerial stints at both Sony Music and BMG, before their merger. And in April 2008 he was appointed Chairman of ARIA, the Australian Recording Industry Association.

But before all of that, he stepped into the music industry industry as a freelance writer for Rolling Stone Australia in 1977, and it’s here where his conversation with Andrew McMillen begins.

Andrew: Ed, you left music journalism behind in the early 1990s. Did you feel as though you rode it out as far as it could go?

Ed: Yeah, I sort of felt like I’d covered it; I felt like I was writing the same article about different people every week. When you do a lot of music writing for a long time, you feel you’re just inserting new names into the same story. After 15 years as a music writer, I just felt like doing something else with my life.

During all those years of music writing, I gained a pretty good understanding of how musicians think, and what they go through; the process of writing songs, recording them and playing them live, what that’s all about. I think I gained a certain amount of empathy for that process. I think that those kinds of life experiences stand me in good stead, because now I find myself sort of in the position of being their business partner in making their careers successful.

We’re in business together. We’re in the business of making money together, I suppose, but we’re also in the business of bringing their creative efforts into the public eye and they need to feel they’re working with people who understand what they’re going through, what they’re trying to achieve. I still spend a lot of time talking to artists about what they do. I think it’s good to have that understanding.

You’ve been invited to appear as a panellist at One Movement For Music. Have you been on many panels before at events like this?

Not many, no. I tend to avoid conferences in Australia, as a rule, because many of them seem to be pitched at an entry-level delegate who is looking to get a start in the business. Some of the conferences I’ve attended in this country seem to be an opportunity to take money from a whole lot of people, but they don’t necessarily add much value to the industry.

There are a lot of people who have vested interest in criticising the status quo, but not necessarily coming up with any kind of solutions. They get up at conferences and make provocative statements and generate publicity for themselves, and I just find that a bit of a waste of time from my perspective. I don’t feel like I gain much from them.

I’m all for discussing issues in a productive way, in a positive way. I love talking about new ideas, new business models, new ways of marketing music. But I just think you have to steer clear of people who are in the business of criticising major record labels for their own gain.

But anyway, this conference looks alright. I think the people behind One Movement have a high level of credibility, so I thought I would give it a shot.

Do you think the volume of people who now seem to be speaking up online against major labels is one of the downsides of everyone having the ability to have their say?

You can’t criticize people for having a point of view. The internet is democratic by nature. Everyone is entitled to say whatever the hell they like, which is fine, of course. But I don’t think many people really understand what record companies do; they’re very quick to judge the way the business works, or the way it has worked, without really understanding it.

I just think there are a lot of uninformed opinions out there, but I suppose to that point, that’s why it’s good to attend a conference like this. If we’re not there explaining how we do or how we work, then no-one will really understand our point of view, will they?

I think that a lot of those misinformed comments come about as a result of people finding it hard to relate to a major label as a group of decision-making individuals. It’s easier to see major labels as faceless organisations.

I think that’s true. I think there has been a lot of demonisation of the music industry in general, and major record labels in particular. It’s sort of easy to do. It’s like saying the big Hollywood studios are evil. It’s an easy position to take, because you don’t really have to explain how they’re evil. It’s generalised evil, but if you actually break it down; if anyone bothered to come look at the people that work at a record label, and the work they actually do, they’d realize that there is actually a group of quite dedicated people trying to make their artists successful, which is pretty much the same as in a lot of other businesses. It’s not like we’re sitting here plotting how to destroy the world, or anything.

A lot of things have changed in the last few years. We, like any business, need to accommodate those changes in consumer behavior and the way that people share, experience and discover music. It’s quite easy to set up an illegal business model that is based around stealing someone else’s property. It’s quite a lot harder to run a legitimate business, and our challenge is that we run a legal, legitimate business. We have actual agreements with artists that we can’t just change on a whim.

If we want to do something new, we often need to get the artist’s consent. Call us old-fashioned, but we have a business that’s based around observing people’s rights and paying people royalties.

When circumstances change in the way people experience music and interact with it, it’s our job to understand that and respond to it. It’s not as if we’re pretending it hasn’t changed, because obviously it has. Our challenge is to evolve with these different media whilst still running a legitimate business, adhering to those contracts, and paying our artists.

It’s quite challenging to evolve quickly in a rapidly changing market. The music industry today is a very different beast to what it was 10 years ago. There has been a huge shift in focus. I think we all understand how much has changed. We’re just learning to have a different role and provide a different range of services for our artists, and a different offer for a consumer that fits the way people experience music now. That’s obviously a constantly moving target. It evolves all the time.

To me, that sounds incredibly difficult to be willing to unlearn the business tactics that worked in the past. It must be mentally draining on a personal level, to turn up week to week and have things change on you. It must be maddening.

It’s not maddening. It’s actually quite exciting. Look, for example, at the role of the record company; ten years ago or even five years ago, the role of the record company was pretty straightforward. Our job was to get an artist’s songs played on the radio, to market the act and to make sure that the CDs were racked up in the shop so that people could buy them, and that was primarily it. That was our job.

Nowadays, the modern record companies see themselves as providing a very different range of services. We’re involved in many cases in working with artists, either at a management level, or a touring level, or providing them with merch, or a whole range of digital activity. We’ve gotten ourselves into all sorts of areas of the business that simply didn’t exist five years ago.

I think for most of us involved in the evolution and transformation, it’s been a really exciting process. It’s certainly challenging, because there’s a whole lot there that you just didn’t know about five years ago. We’ve all had to learn a huge amount.

I wouldn’t say it’s been a negative experience. I think it’s been quite positive, really. The business has to change to survive and that’s all part of the fun.

I’m glad you have a positive outlook, Ed. That’s really cool.

You have to, really.

It’s an ‘if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry’ sort of thing?

Yeah, well often I think people look at the music business and say “CD sales are declining, so therefore the business is in trouble”. I don’t really see it that way, because whilst CD sales are obviously under some sort of threat in the longer term, the sales of legitimate digital music are increasing at an incredible rate. You are seeing an industry that’s changing before your eyes in terms of the way people buy music and experience it.

Unfortunately, people look at the CDs declining and go, “Well, the business must be in trouble. These people must be really worried,” but it’s been fairly obvious that CD sales were going to slowly decline as other businesses evolved. The business is only failing if you look at it from that particular angle. I think everyone involved in it chooses not to do that.

Alright Ed, one last question that I’ve been asking everyone I’ve spoken to for this blog. One Movement’s tagline is “Artist, Industry, Fan United”.  What needs to change in order to better unite those three things?

I always like to say that the most important relationship in music is the relationship between an artist and their fan. That is at the core of all music experience, whether it be the live experience, people buying records, or people listening music on the radio. An artist creates a piece of music, and someone loves it. That relationship between the fan and the music is absolutely sacred, and it’s what drives our entire business at every level.

The job of the industry is to facilitate that relationship and make it enjoyable, seamless, and rewarding for everybody involved, and to not get in the way of that process any more than we have to. And as much as possible, to add value.

So to answer your question, Andrew, the challenge to the industry is to always add value to the relationship between artists and fans.

Ed St John will appear as part of the MUSEXPO Asia Pacific panels at One Movement For Music Perth, October 17-18 2009.