An afternoon with Dick Griffey: his philosophy and thoughts on business, with reflections

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by Brenda T. Myers

Dick Griffey on Why He Founded the J. Hines Company

Here in this country, white folks have been smart. Distributors have the best of everything. It is not necessary for them to be very talented, since they have an infrastructure that says, "If you want to get your product to the marketplace, you have to come through me." Whether you are Pavarotti or M. C. Hammer or Miles Davis, you have to go to one of these guys to get your creation to the marketplace. Not only does this hold true in music, this is true across the board.

Basically, the distributor controls your life. He takes your product, gets first count of the money, tells you how many he sold; then he pays you, if and when and how he gets ready. So distribution really controls the marketplace. It matters not what kind of genius you are. You can come up with the greatest idea in the world, but if you cannot get it to the marketplace, you may as well not have thought of it, because distribution controls you.

I have really been encouraged by some of the young people I see, some of the rappers, neighborhood entrepreneurs. They are not sitting around waiting for the man to give them a chance. They are going into the studios, making their own records, and selling them at the swap meets. They are telemarketing from their homes. They are selling five and six thousand units (tapes and/or CDs) in their neighborhoods. So I said to myself, "If these young people, with their limited resources, can sell five or six thousand recordings in their neighborhoods, with my expertise and my resources behind them, they could sell five or six million recordings around the world. They have the right to be heard, they deserve that chance. There needs to be an alternative distribution system in this country. Why should African Americans in Compton, California, have to go to Westwood to make deals with Europeans to sell rap records to African Americans in Compton?" Think about that! Not only are we the creators of the art, we are the primary consumers. We can think up something, dream up something, and make it. Do we then have to go to Corporate America and cut a deal to turn around and ship recordings back to ourselves to sell in our own neighborhoods? I figure that, four hundred years after slavery began, we are smarter than that. We have to be able to figure out something better than that.

I was bold enough to try to change things and came up with a program called "From Slaveship to Ownership." It is time that we started owning what we create. The first thing we must do is explain to people what we mean by ownership, since it is such a foreign concept to us. Ownership means owning the properties, owning the contracts, owning the masters.

Part of the problem in our community is that the elders did not teach the young. Although the music business is the biggest industry we have in the African American community, there is no college or university to teach you how to succeed in this business. The white folks are not going to teach you. They will teach each other, but not you.