User:SimonGlickman/sandbox

Lenny Beer is a music industry trade editor, consultant, artist manager and lecturer.

Beer co-founded (with Dennis Lavinthal) the influential--and many would say notorious--industry trade publication HITS Magazine, serving as Editor in Chief of that print publication and its eventual digital incarnation, HitsDailyDouble.com. He’s also a co-founder and principal of The MGMT Company, which guides the careers of 30 Seconds to Mars, Bush, Andrew W.K., The Airborne Toxic Event, The Bravery, Eagles of Death Metal and other acts. He’s been an instructor in UCLA’s The Music Business Now: How It Really Works course since 2003.

The Brooklyn native received his Bachelor’s degree from Carnegie-Mellon in 1971 and his MBA from NYU in 1973. As a newly minted business-school grad he was snapped up by hair-care giant Clairol, where he toiled unhappily for seven months. "I was working at Clairol making $17,500 dollars a year," he recalled in an interview for the PBS documentary The Way the Music Died. "It was my first job. And this job at Record World magazine opened up and it was paying $8,000 dollars a year, except they were all wearing t-shirts and going to rock concerts and getting free records. It seemed great over there, and wonderful, and I was offered a job and I jumped immediately."

At Record World Beer singlehandedly revolutionized the tabulation of music sales charts by directly soliciting piece counts from retailers (nobody else did at the time). This innovation earned him industry-wide recognition, and he toured the country giving seminars about compiling real sales charts.

He worked his way to VP at the magazine, but his salary remained underwhelming. So in 1978 he accepted a job as VP of Promotion at 20th Century Fox Records. Once again he brought about methodological changes, this time by turning the typical radio-promotion model on its head: He and his team broke records by cultivating large numbers of smaller-market stations to build overall market share. But the exec who’d hired him got fired, so Lenny got fired too. An opportunity to go independent arose when his friend Dennis Lavinthal suggested they start a magazine together. But this plan was interrupted by Warner Bros. exec Russ Thyret, who hired them to promote his entire slate of releases – just as the label was beginning a hot streak that would become legendary. Beer and Lavinthal were so successful as independent promoters that the other labels soon came calling. (The partners also managed Steely Dan founder Donald Fagen during the time of his 1982 solo album The Nightfly, which earned seven Grammy nominations.) But in 1986 a payola scandal came crashing down on the industry – prompting the pair to launch their magazine.

HITS was born that year; blending sophomoric humor, retail and radio charts, and industry news and gossip, quickly amassing a following as a more satirical, blunt alternative to industry "bible" Billboard. "Roll over Billboard and tell Radio & Records the news," wrote the Los Angeles Times upon the magazine's arrival, adding, "the glossy new trade paper has set its sights on stealing some of the spotlight from the two older publications." HITSDailyDouble.com launched in 2000 (promising, in a press release, to "stink up the Web in much the same way HITS has disgraced the realm of print" ), further consolidating the trade's popularity with industry execs, artists and follows of the business. The magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2011.

Beer has also served as producer on several theatrical productions, notably Suzan Lori-Parks’ Pulitzer-winning, Tony-nominated Topdog/Underdog, starring Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def, and is a member of the NARAS Grammy Screening Committee.