Only the music is in the clouds - Windham Hill Productions - Industry Overview

Nation's Business, Nov, 1991 by Michael Barrier

In the $7 billion recording industry, as in other parts of the entertainment business, extravagance is chronic. There is always the temptation to turn on the tap and let the money flow: a multimillion-dollar contract for a hot singer here, a million-dollar recording session there.

Working as she does in this highly colored environment, Anne Robinson seems like a throwback, a black-and-white photo in a stack of Kodachromes. Robinson, 43, is president and chief executive officer of Windham Hill Productions, a Palo Alto, Calif., recording company. She and her partner, William Ackerman, started the company with all of $300, in 1976, and she still talks as if she didn't have much more than that to work with.

"We spend our money very cautiously," she says. "We don't do $100,000 recordings; we do $35,000 recordings. You can start to make money a lot faster on a $35,000 recording."

Robinson doesn't believe in spending lots of money on the kind of electronic tinkering that makes human performers sound like indistinguishable androids. She doesn't believe in paying recording artists huge advances on their royalties.

"I want the artists to understand that we're in business together," she says. "If they get a huge advance, it might take them a long time to start making money after tha. I really believe very strongly in the psychology of getting a check very soon after you release the record, and with great regularity and increasing dollar volume after that."

As for Windham Hill's own dollar volume, Robinson says that annual revenues are now in the $25 million to $30 million range. The company remains privately held and free of debt. Robinson used to say that Windham Hill had never released an unprofitable album; she will no longer go quite that far; but she does say that the company's success rate is very high. And, she adds, Windham Hill "makes money every year."

Windham Hill's success has been more than financial. Like only a few other recording companies, it has established a strong identity of its own, one so distinct that some record stores display its compact discs and cassettes in a section marked "Windham Hill," confident that customers will know what the means.

It was through Windham Hill that what is now called New Age music reached a wide public. The term New Age is one that Robinson finds distasteful--it was applied by outsiders who founds in the music an aural analogue to the mysticism exemplified by the acress Shirley MacLaine's books on reincarnation. But New Age has served as a useful tag for a kind of music that has emerged as an alternative to rock and rap. New Age music tends to be, in contrast to rock's sweaty extroversion, an intimate, introspective music, typically performed by a solo instrumentalist--a guitarist or pianist. Ackerman himself set the pattern on some of Windham Hill's earliest albums, performing plaintive solos on a closely miked acoustic guitar.

At its worst, such music resembles cocktail-hour tinkle; at its strongest, it is but a few steps removed from the work of such contemporary classical composers as John Adams and Philip Glass; and it often seems to aspire to the droning serenity of some Eastern music (Robinson herself went to Tibet in 1985 and speaks of her visit there as "an extraordinary experience").

Major record companies have spun off New Age labels to compete with Windham Hill, but it remains the class of the field, and one of the largest players in a market that has grown to more than $200 million in annual sales.

Windham Hill has benefited not only from its early start but also from a continuing attention to the niceties of producing quality records. "In the early years," Robinson recalls, "a lot of people looked at the demands we had as to how the records were manufactured or the covers were printed, and they'd say, "Oh, you don't need to do that.' I'd say, 'Oh, yes, I do. You've got to come up to this level of quality, or you're not going to be doing business with me.'"

In those early years, Windham Hill was a very small company indeed. When it first began releasing records, in fact, it wasn't a company at all. In 1976, Robinson was working in a Palo Alto bookstore; her friend Ackerman--like her a Stanford University dropout--was a carpenter and a guitarist. When they decided to put out an album of Ackerman's guitar solos under the tile "In Search of the Turtle's Navel," they got 60 admirers to put up $5 each in advance. The $300 they raised helped pay for the pressing of the records.

Since albums could be pressed only in lots of 500 or more, Robinson and Ackerman found themselves with 440 leftover LPs. "We thought we'd never get rid of them," Robinson says. She lured buyers by playing the record at the bookstore where she worked, and a health-food store carried the record on consignment. Then a childhood friend of Ackerman's--a promotion man for a big record label--took 10 copies of the album and talked several radio stations in Seattle and Portland, Ore., into playing it, stimulating demand for the album in those cities.